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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Story of the Outlaw, by Emerson Hough
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Story of the Outlaw
+       A Study of the Western Desperado
+
+Author: Emerson Hough
+
+Release Date: January 17, 2008 [EBook #24342]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF THE OUTLAW ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by D. Alexander and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ THE
+ STORY OF THE OUTLAW
+
+ _A STUDY OF THE WESTERN DESPERADO_
+
+ WITH HISTORICAL NARRATIVES OF FAMOUS OUTLAWS;
+ THE STORIES OF NOTED BORDER WARS;
+ VIGILANTE MOVEMENTS AND ARMED
+ CONFLICTS ON THE FRONTIER
+
+ BY
+ EMERSON HOUGH
+
+
+ NEW YORK
+ THE OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY
+ 1907
+
+
+
+
+ COPYRIGHT, 1905, BY
+ THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY
+
+ COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY
+ EMERSON HOUGH
+
+ Entered at Stationers' Hall, London, England
+
+ _All Rights Reserved_
+
+ THE OUTING PRESS
+ DEPOSIT, N. Y.
+
+
+
+
+The Story of the Outlaw
+
+[Illustration: From a painting by John W. Norton
+PLUMMER'S MEN HOLDING UP THE BANNACK STAGE
+(_See page 119_)]
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+In offering this study of the American desperado, the author constitutes
+himself no apologist for the acts of any desperado; yet neither does he
+feel that apology is needed for the theme itself. The outlaw, the
+desperado--that somewhat distinct and easily recognizable figure
+generally known in the West as the "bad man"--is a character unique in
+our national history, and one whose like scarcely has been produced in
+any land other than this. It is not necessary to promote absurd and
+melodramatic impressions regarding a type properly to be called
+historic, and properly to be handled as such. The truth itself is
+thrilling enough, and difficult as that frequently has been of
+discovery, it is the truth which has been sought herein.
+
+A thesis on the text of disregard for law might well be put to better
+use than to serve merely as exciting reading, fit to pass away an idle
+hour. It might, and indeed it may--if the reader so shall choose--offer
+a foundation for wider arguments than those suggested in these pages,
+which deal rather with premises than conclusions. The lesson of our
+dealings with our bad men of the past can teach us, if we like, the best
+method of dealing with our bad men to-day.
+
+There are other lessons which we might take from an acquaintance with
+frontier methods of enforcing respect for the law; and the first of
+these is a practical method of handling criminals in the initial
+executive acts of the law. Never were American laws so strong as to-day,
+and never were our executive officers so weak. Our cities frequently are
+ridden with criminals or rioters. We set hundreds of policemen to
+restore order, but order is not restored. What is the average policeman
+as a criminal-taker? Cloddy and coarse of fiber, rarely with personal
+heredity of mental or bodily vigor, with no training at arms, with no
+sharp, incisive quality of nerve action, fat, unwieldy, unable to run a
+hundred yards and keep his breath, not skilled enough to kill his man
+even when he has him cornered, he is the archetype of all unseemliness
+as the agent of a law which to-day needs a sterner upholding than ever
+was the case in all our national life. We use this sort of tools in
+handling criminals, when each of us knows, or ought to know, that the
+city which would select twenty Western peace officers of the old type
+and set them to work without restrictions as to the size of their
+imminent graveyards, would free itself of criminals in three months'
+time, and would remain free so long as its methods remained in force.
+
+As for the subject-matter of the following work, it may be stated that,
+while attention has been paid to the great and well-known instances and
+epochs of outlawry, many of the facts given have not previously found
+their way into print. The story of the Lincoln County War of the
+Southwest is given truthfully for the first time, and after full
+acquaintance with sources of information now inaccessible or passing
+away. The Stevens County War of Kansas, which took place, as it were,
+but yesterday and directly at our doors, has had no history but a
+garbled one; and as much might be said of many border encounters whose
+chief use heretofore has been to curdle the blood in penny-dreadfuls.
+Accuracy has been sought among the confusing statements purporting to
+constitute the record in such historic movements as those of the
+"vigilantes" of California and Montana mining days, and of the later
+cattle days when "wars" were common between thieves and outlaws, and the
+representatives of law and order,--themselves not always duly
+authenticated officers of the law.
+
+No one man can have lived through the entire time of the American
+frontier; and any work of this kind must be in part a matter of
+compilation in so far as it refers to matters of the past. In all cases
+where practicable, however, the author has made up the records from
+stories of actual participants, survivors and eye-witnesses; and he is
+able in some measure to write of things and men personally known during
+twenty-five years of Western life. Captain Patrick F. Garrett, of New
+Mexico, central figure of the border fighting in that district in the
+early railroad days, has been of much service in extending the author's
+information on that region and time. Mr. Herbert M. Tonney, now of
+Illinois, tells his own story as a survivor of the typical county-seat
+war of Kansas, in which he was shot and left for dead. Many other men
+have offered valuable narratives.
+
+In dealing with any subject of early American history, there is no
+authority more incontestable than Mr. Alexander Hynds, of Dandridge,
+Tennessee, whose acquaintance with singular and forgotten bits of early
+frontier history borders upon the unique in its way. Neither does better
+authority exist than Hon. N. P. Langford, of Minnesota, upon all matters
+having to do with life in the Rocky Mountain region in the decade of
+1860-1870. He was an argonaut of the Rockies and a citizen of Montana
+and of other Western territories before the coming of the days of law.
+Free quotations are made from his graphic work, "Vigilante Days and
+Ways," which is both interesting of itself and valuable as a historical
+record.
+
+The stories of modern train-robbing bandits and outlaw gangs are taken
+partly from personal narratives, partly from judicial records, and
+partly from works frequently more sensational than accurate, and
+requiring much sifting and verifying in detail. Naturally, very many
+volumes of Western history and adventure have been consulted. Much of
+this labor has been one of love for the days and places concerned, which
+exist no longer as they once did. The total result, it is hoped, will
+aid in telling at least a portion of the story of the vivid and
+significant life of the West, and of that frontier whose van, if ever
+marked by human lawlessness, has, none the less, ever been led by the
+banner of human liberty. May that banner still wave to-day, and though
+blood be again the price, may it never permanently be replaced by that
+of license and injustice in our America.
+
+
+
+
+ CONTENTS
+
+
+ CHAPTER                                                   PAGE
+
+     I THE DESPERADO                                          1
+
+    II THE IMITATION DESPERADO                               14
+
+   III THE LAND OF THE DESPERADO                             22
+
+    IV THE EARLY OUTLAW                                      35
+
+     V THE VIGILANTES OF CALIFORNIA                          74
+
+    VI THE OUTLAW OF THE MOUNTAINS                           98
+
+   VII HENRY PLUMMER                                        105
+
+  VIII BOONE HELM                                           127
+
+    IX DEATH SCENES OF DESPERADOES                          137
+
+     X JOSEPH A. SLADE                                      145
+
+    XI THE DESPERADO OF THE PLAINS                          154
+
+   XII WILD BILL HICKOK                                     167
+
+  XIII FRONTIER WARS                                        187
+
+   XIV THE LINCOLN COUNTY WAR                               196
+
+    XV THE STEVENS COUNTY WAR                               227
+
+   XVI BIOGRAPHIES OF BAD MEN                               256
+
+  XVII THE FIGHT OF BUCKSHOT ROBERTS                        284
+
+ XVIII THE MAN HUNT                                         292
+
+   XIX BAD MEN OF TEXAS                                     313
+
+    XX MODERN BAD MEN                                       340
+
+   XXI BAD MEN OF THE INDIAN NATIONS                        371
+
+  XXII DESPERADOES OF THE CITIES                            393
+
+
+
+
+ ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                                   FACING PAGE
+
+ Plummer's Men Holding Up the Bannack Stage    (_Frontispiece_)
+
+ The Scene of Many Little Wars                               12
+
+ Types of Border Barricades                                  36
+
+ The Scene of Many Hangings                                 138
+
+ How the Rustler Worked                                     164
+
+ Wild Bill Hickok's Desperate Fight                         172
+
+ John Simpson Chisum                                        198
+
+ Men Prominent in the Lincoln County War                    218
+
+ The "Women in the Case"                                    222
+
+ The McSween Store and Bank                                 240
+
+ Billy the Kid                                              258
+
+ "The Next Instant He Fired and Shot Ollinger Dead"         272
+
+ Pat F. Garrett                                             294
+
+ A Typical Western Man-Hunt                                 302
+
+ The Old Chisum Ranch                                       330
+
+ The Old Fritz Ranch                                        358
+
+ A Border Fortress                                          358
+
+ "Afterward"                                                398
+
+
+
+
+Chapter I
+
+The Desperado--_Analysis of His Make-up_--_How the Desperado Got to Be
+Bad and Why_--_Some Men Naturally Skillful with Weapons_--_Typical
+Desperadoes_.
+
+
+Energy and action may be of two sorts, good or bad; this being as well
+as we can phrase it in human affairs. The live wires that net our
+streets are more dangerous than all the bad men the country ever knew,
+but we call electricity on the whole good in its action. We lay it under
+law, but sometimes it breaks out and has its own way. These outbreaks
+will occur until the end of time, in live wires and vital men. Each land
+in the world produces its own men individually bad--and, in time, other
+bad men who kill them for the general good.
+
+There are bad Chinamen, bad Filipinos, bad Mexicans, and Indians, and
+negroes, and bad white men. The white bad man is the worst bad man of
+the world, and the prize-taking bad man of the lot is the Western white
+bad man. Turn the white man loose in a land free of restraint--such as
+was always that Golden Fleece land, vague, shifting and transitory,
+known as the American West--and he simply reverts to the ways of
+Teutonic and Gothic forests. The civilized empire of the West has grown
+in spite of this, because of that other strange germ, the love of law,
+anciently implanted in the soul of the Anglo-Saxon. That there was
+little difference between the bad man and the good man who went out
+after him was frequently demonstrated in the early roaring days of the
+West. The religion of progress and civilization meant very little to the
+Western town marshal, who sometimes, or often, was a peace officer
+chiefly because he was a good fighting man.
+
+We band together and "elect" political representatives who do not
+represent us at all. We "elect" executive officers who execute nothing
+but their own wishes. We pay innumerable policemen to take from our
+shoulders the burden of self-protection; and the policemen do not do
+this thing. Back of all the law is the undelegated personal right, that
+vague thing which, none the less, is recognized in all the laws and
+charters of the world; as England and France of old, and Russia to-day,
+may show. This undelegated personal right is in each of us, or ought to
+be. If there is in you no hot blood to break into flame and set you
+arbiter for yourself in some sharp, crucial moment, then God pity you,
+for no woman ever loved you if she could find anything else to love, and
+you are fit neither as man nor citizen.
+
+As the individual retains an undelegated right, so does the body social.
+We employ politicians, but at heart most of us despise politicians and
+love fighting men. Society and law are not absolutely wise nor
+absolutely right, but only as a compromise relatively wise and right.
+The bad man, so called, may have been in large part relatively bad. This
+much we may say scientifically, and without the slightest cheapness. It
+does not mean that we shall waste any maudlin sentiment over a
+desperado; and certainly it does not mean that we shall have anything
+but contempt for the pretender at desperadoism.
+
+Who and what was the bad man? Scientifically and historically he was
+even as you and I. Whence did he come? From any and all places. What
+did he look like? He came in all sorts and shapes, all colors and
+sizes--just as cowards do. As to knowing him, the only way was by trying
+him. His reputation, true or false, just or unjust, became, of course,
+the herald of the bad man in due time. The "killer" of a Western town
+might be known throughout the state or in several states. His reputation
+might long outlast that of able statesmen and public benefactors.
+
+What distinguished the bad man in peculiarity from his fellowman? Why
+was he better with weapons? What is courage, in the last analysis? We
+ought to be able to answer these questions in a purely scientific way.
+We have machines for photographing relative quickness of thought and
+muscular action. We are able to record the varying speeds of impulse
+transmission in the nerves of different individuals. If you were picking
+out a bad man, would you select one who, on the machine, showed a
+dilatory nerve response? Hardly. The relative fitness for a man to be
+"bad," to become extraordinarily quick and skillful with weapons, could,
+without doubt, be predetermined largely by these scientific
+measurements. Of course, having no thought-machines in the early West,
+they got at the matter by experimenting, and so, very often, by a
+graveyard route. You could not always stop to feel the pulse of a
+suspected killer.
+
+The use of firearms with swiftness and accuracy was necessary in the
+calling of the desperado, after fate had marked him and set him apart
+for the inevitable, though possibly long-deferred, end. This skill with
+weapons was a natural gift in the case of nearly every man who attained
+great reputation whether as killer of victims or as killer of killers.
+Practice assisted in proficiency, but a Wild Bill or a Slade or a Billy
+the Kid was born and not made.
+
+Quickness in nerve action is usually backed with good digestion, and
+hard life in the open is good medicine for the latter. This, however,
+does not wholly cover the case. A slow man also might be a brave man.
+Sooner or later, if he went into the desperado business on either side
+of the game, he would fall before the man who was brave as himself and a
+fraction faster with the gun.
+
+There were unknown numbers of potential bad men who died mute and
+inglorious after a life spent at a desk or a plow. They might have been
+bad if matters had shaped right for that. Each war brings out its own
+heroes from unsuspected places; each sudden emergency summons its own
+fit man. Say that a man took to the use of weapons, and found himself
+arbiter of life and death with lesser animals, and able to grant them
+either at a distance. He went on, pleased with his growing skill with
+firearms. He discovered that as the sword had in one age of the world
+lengthened the human arm, so did the six-shooter--that epochal
+instrument, invented at precisely that time of the American life when
+the human arm needed lengthening--extend and strengthen his arm, and
+make him and all men equal. The user of weapons felt his powers
+increased. So now, in time, there came to him a moment of danger. There
+was his enemy. There was the affront, the challenge. Perhaps it was male
+against male, a matter of sex, prolific always in bloodshed. It might be
+a matter of property, or perhaps it was some taunt as to his own
+personal courage. Perhaps alcohol came into the question, as was often
+the case. For one reason or the other, it came to the ordeal of combat.
+It was the undelegated right of one individual against that of another.
+The law was not invoked--the law would not serve. Even as the quicker
+set of nerves flashed into action, the arm shot forward, and there
+smote the point of flame as did once the point of steel. The victim
+fell, his own weapon clutched in his hand, a fraction too late. The law
+cleared the killer. It was "self-defense." "It was an even break," his
+fellowmen said; although thereafter they were more reticent with him and
+sought him out less frequently.
+
+"It was an even break," said the killer to himself--"an even break, him
+or me." But, perhaps, the repetition of this did not serve to blot out a
+certain mental picture. I have had a bad man tell me that he killed his
+second man to get rid of the mental image of his first victim.
+
+But this exigency might arise again; indeed, most frequently did arise.
+Again the embryo bad man was the quicker. His self-approbation now,
+perhaps, began to grow. This was the crucial time of his life. He might
+go on now and become a bad man, or he might cheapen and become an
+imitation desperado. In either event, his third man left him still more
+confident. His courage and his skill in weapons gave him assuredness and
+ease at the time of an encounter. He was now becoming a specialist. Time
+did the rest, until at length they buried him.
+
+The bad man of genuine sort rarely looked the part assigned to him in
+the popular imagination. The long-haired blusterer, adorned with a
+dialect that never was spoken, serves very well in fiction about the
+West, but that is not the real thing. The most dangerous man was apt to
+be quiet and smooth-spoken. When an antagonist blustered and threatened,
+the most dangerous man only felt rising in his own soul, keen and stern,
+that strange exultation which often comes with combat for the man
+naturally brave. A Western officer of established reputation once said
+to me, while speaking of a recent personal difficulty into which he had
+been forced: "I hadn't been in anything of that sort for years, and I
+wished I was out of it. Then I said to myself, 'Is it true that you are
+getting old--have you lost your nerve?' Then all at once the old feeling
+came over me, and I was just like I used to be. I felt calm and happy,
+and I laughed after that. I jerked my gun and shoved it into his
+stomach. He put up his hands and apologized. 'I will give you a hundred
+dollars now,' he said, 'if you will tell me where you got that gun.' I
+suppose I was a trifle quick for him."
+
+The virtue of the "drop" was eminently respected among bad men.
+Sometimes, however, men were killed in the last desperate conviction
+that no man on earth was as quick as they. What came near being an
+incident of that kind was related by a noted Western sheriff.
+
+"Down on the edge of the Pecos valley," said he, "a dozen miles below
+old Fort Sumner, there used to be a little saloon, and I once captured a
+man there. He came in from somewhere east of our territory, and was
+wanted for murder. The reward offered for him was twelve hundred
+dollars. Since he was a stranger, none of us knew him, but the sheriff's
+descriptions sent in said he had a freckled face, small hands, and a red
+spot in one eye. I heard that there was a new saloon-keeper in there,
+and thought he might be the man, so I took a deputy and went down one
+day to see about it.
+
+"I told my deputy not to shoot until he saw me go after my gun. I didn't
+want to hold the man up unless he was the right one, and I wanted to be
+sure about that identification mark in the eye. Now, when a bartender is
+waiting on you, he will never look you in the face until just as you
+raise your glass to drink. I told my deputy that we would order a couple
+of drinks, and so get a chance to look this fellow in the eye. When he
+looked up, I did look him in the eye, and there was the red spot!
+
+"I dropped my glass and jerked my gun and covered him, but he just
+wouldn't put up his hands for a while. I didn't want to kill him, but I
+thought I surely would have to. He kept both of his hands resting on the
+bar, and I knew he had a gun within three feet of him somewhere. At last
+slowly he gave in. I treated him well, as I always did a prisoner, told
+him we would square it if we had made any mistake. We put irons on him
+and started for Las Vegas with him in a wagon. The next morning, out on
+the trail, he confessed everything to me. We turned him over, and later
+he was tried and hung. I always considered him to be a pretty bad man.
+So far as the result was concerned, he might about as well have gone
+after his gun. I certainly thought that was what he was going to do. He
+had sand. I could just see him stand there and balance the chances in
+his mind.
+
+"Another of the nerviest men I ever ran up against," the same officer
+went on, reflectively, "I met when I was sheriff of Dona A�a county, New
+Mexico. I was in Las Cruces, when there came in a sheriff from over in
+the Indian Nations looking for a fugitive who had broken out of a
+penitentiary after killing a guard and another man or so. This sheriff
+told me that the criminal in question was the most desperate man he had
+ever known, and that no matter how we came on him, he would put up a
+fight and we would have to kill him before we could take him. We located
+our man, who was cooking on a ranch six or eight miles out of town. I
+told the sheriff to stay in town, because the man would know him and
+would not know us. I had a Mexican deputy along with me.
+
+"I put out my deputy on one side of the house and went in. I found my
+man just wiping his hands on a towel after washing his dishes. I threw
+down on him, and he answered by smashing me in the face, and then
+jumping through the window like a squirrel. I caught at him and tore the
+shirt off his back, but I didn't stop him. Then I ran out of the door
+and caught him on the porch. I did not want to kill him, so I struck him
+over the head with the handcuffs I had ready for him. He dropped, but
+came up like a flash, and struck me so hard with his fist that I was
+badly jarred. We fought hammer and tongs for a while, but at length he
+broke away, sprang through the door, and ran down the hall. He was going
+to his room after his gun. At that moment my Mexican came in, and having
+no sentiment about it, just whaled away and shot him in the back,
+killing him on the spot. The doctors said when they examined this man's
+body that he was the most perfect physical specimen they had ever seen.
+I can testify that he was a fighter. The sheriff offered me the reward,
+but I wouldn't take any of it. I told him that I would be over in his
+country some time, and that I was sure he would do as much for me if I
+needed his help. I hope that if I do have to go after his particular
+sort of bad people, I'll be lucky in getting the first start on my man.
+That man was as desperate a fighter as I ever saw or expect to see. Give
+a man of that stripe any kind of a show and he's going to kill you,
+that's all. He knows that he has no chance under the law.
+
+"Sometimes they got away with desperate chances, too, as many a peace
+officer has learned to his cost. The only way to go after such a man is
+to go prepared, and then to give him no earthly show to get the best of
+you. I don't mean that an officer ought to shoot down a man if he has a
+show to take his prisoner alive; but I do mean that he ought to remember
+that he may be pitted against a man who is just as brave as he is,
+and just as good with a gun, and who is fighting for his life."
+
+[Illustration: THE SCENE OF MANY LITTLE WARS
+More men have been killed in this street than in any other in America]
+
+Of course, such a man as this, whether confronted by an officer of the
+law or by another man against whom he has a personal grudge, or who has
+in any way challenged him to the ordeal of weapons, was steadfast in his
+own belief that he was as brave as any, and as quick with weapons. Thus,
+until at length he met his master in the law of human progress and
+civilization, he simply added to his own list of victims, or was added
+to the list of another of his own sort. For a very long time, moreover,
+there existed a great region on the frontier where the law could not
+protect. There was good reason, therefore, for a man's learning to
+depend upon his own courage and strength and skill. He had nothing else
+to protect him, whether he was good or bad. In the typical days of the
+Western bad man, life was the property of the individual, and not of
+society, and one man placed his life against another's as the only way
+of solving hard personal problems. Those days and those conditions
+brought out some of the boldest and most reckless men the earth ever
+saw. Before we freely criticize them, we ought fully to understand them.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+
+The Imitation Desperado--_The Cheap "Long-Hair"_--_A Desperado in
+Appearance, a Coward at Heart_--_Some Desperadoes Who Did Not "Stand the
+Acid."_
+
+
+The counterfeit bad man, in so far as he has a place in literature, was
+largely produced by Western consumptives for Eastern consumption.
+Sometimes he was in person manufactured in the East and sent West. It is
+easy to see the philosophical difference between the actual bad man of
+the West and the imitation article. The bad man was an evolution; the
+imitation bad man was an instantaneous creation, a supply arising full
+panoplied to fill a popular demand. Silently there arose, partly in the
+West and partly in the East, men who gravely and calmly proceeded to
+look the part. After looking the part for a time, to their own
+satisfaction at least, and after taking themselves seriously as
+befitted the situation, they, in very many instances, faded away and
+disappeared in that Nowhere whence they came. Some of them took
+themselves too seriously for their own good. Of course, there existed
+for some years certain possibilities that any one of these bad men might
+run against the real thing.
+
+There always existed in the real, sober, level-headed West a contempt
+for the West-struck man who was not really bad, but who wanted to seem
+"bad." Singularly enough, men of this type were not so frequently local
+products as immigrants. The "bootblack bad man" was a character
+recognized on the frontier--the city tough gone West with ambitions to
+achieve a bad eminence. Some of these men were partially bad for a
+while. Some of them, no doubt, even left behind them, after their sudden
+funerals, the impression that they had been wholly bad. You cannot
+detect all the counterfeit currency in the world, severe as the test for
+counterfeits was in the old West. There is, of course, no great amount
+of difference between the West and the East. All America, as well as the
+West, demanded of its citizens nothing so much as genuineness. Yet the
+Western phrase, to "stand the acid," was not surpassed in graphic
+descriptiveness. When an imitation bad man came into a town of the old
+frontier, he had to "stand the acid" or get out. His hand would be
+called by some one. "My friend," said old Bob Bobo, the famous
+Mississippi bear hunter, to a man who was doing some pretty loud
+talking, "I have always noticed that when a man goes out hunting for
+trouble in these bottoms, he almost always finds it." Two weeks later,
+this same loud talker threatened a calm man in simple jeans pants, who
+took a shotgun and slew him impulsively. Now, the West got its hot blood
+largely from the South, and the dogma of the Southern town was the same
+in the Western mining town or cow camp--the bad man or the would-be bad
+man had to declare himself before long, and the acid bottle was always
+close at hand.
+
+That there were grades in counterfeit bad men was accepted as a truth on
+the frontier. A man might be known as dangerous, as a murderer at heart,
+and yet be despised. The imitation bad man discovered that it is
+comparatively easy to terrify a good part of the population of a
+community. Sometimes a base imitation of a desperado is exalted in the
+public eye as the real article. A few years ago four misled hoodlums of
+Chicago held up a street-car barn, killed two men, stole a sum of money,
+killed a policeman and another man, and took refuge in a dugout in the
+sand hills below the city, comporting themselves according to the most
+accepted dime-novel standards. Clumsily arrested by one hundred men or
+so, instead of being tidily killed by three or four, as would have been
+the case on the frontier, they were put in jail, given columns of
+newspaper notice, and worshiped by large crowds of maudlin individuals.
+These men probably died in the belief that they were "bad." They were
+not bad men, but imitations, counterfeit, and, indeed, nothing more than
+cheap and dirty little murderers.
+
+Of course, we all feel able to detect the mere notoriety hunter, who
+poses about in cheap pretentiousness; but now and then in the West there
+turned up something more difficult to understand. Perhaps the most
+typical case of imitation bad man ever known, at least in the Southwest,
+was Bob Ollinger, who was killed by Billy the Kid in 1881, when the
+latter escaped from jail at Lincoln, New Mexico. That Ollinger was a
+killer had been proved beyond the possibility of a doubt. He had no
+respect for human life, and those who knew him best knew that he was a
+murderer at heart. His reputation was gained otherwise than through the
+severe test of an "even break." Some say that he killed Chavez, a
+Mexican, as he offered his own hand in greeting. He killed another man,
+Hill, in a similarly treacherous way. Later, when, as a peace officer,
+he was with a deputy, Pierce, serving a warrant on one Jones, he pulled
+his gun and, without need or provocation, shot Jones through. The same
+bullet, passing through Jones's body, struck Pierce in the leg and left
+him a cripple for life. Again, Ollinger was out as a deputy with a noted
+sheriff in pursuit of a Mexican criminal, who had taken refuge in a
+ditch. Ollinger wanted only to get into a position where he could shoot
+the man, but his superior officer crawled alone up the ditch, and,
+rising suddenly, covered his man and ordered him to surrender. The
+Mexican threw down his gun and said that he would surrender to the
+sheriff, but that he was sure Ollinger would kill him. This fear was
+justified. "When I brought out the man," said the sheriff, "Ollinger
+came up on the run, with his cocked six-shooter in his hand. His long
+hair was flying behind him as he ran, and I never in my life saw so
+devilish a look on any human being's face. He simply wanted to shoot
+that Mexican, and he chased him around me until I had to tell him I
+would kill him if he did not stop." "Ollinger was a born murderer at
+heart," the sheriff added later. "I never slept out with him that I did
+not watch him. After I had more of a reputation, I think Ollinger would
+have been glad to kill me for the notoriety of it. I never gave him a
+chance to shoot me in the back or when I was asleep. Of course, you will
+understand that we had to use for deputies such material as we could
+get."
+
+Ollinger was the sort of imitation desperado that looks the part. He
+wore his hair long and affected the ultra-Western dress, which to-day is
+despised in the West. He was one of the very few men at that
+time--twenty-five years ago--who carried a knife at his belt. When he
+was in such a town as Las Vegas or Sante F�, he delighted to put on a
+buckskin shirt, spread his hair out on his shoulders, and to walk
+through the streets, picking his teeth with his knife, or once in a
+while throwing it in such a way that it would stick up in a tree or a
+board. He presented an eye-filling spectacle, and was indeed the ideal
+imitation bad man. This being the case, there may be interest in
+following out his life to its close, and in noting how the bearing of
+the bad man's title sometimes exacted a very high price of the claimant.
+
+Ollinger, who had made many threats against Billy the Kid, was very
+cordially hated by the latter. Together with Deputy Bell, of White Oaks,
+Ollinger had been appointed to guard the Kid for two weeks previous to
+the execution of the death sentence which had been imposed upon the
+latter. The Kid did not want to harm Bell, but he dearly hated Ollinger,
+who never had lost an opportunity to taunt him. Watching his chance, the
+Kid at length killed both Bell and Ollinger, shooting the latter with
+Ollinger's own shotgun, with which Ollinger had often menaced his
+prisoner.
+
+Other than these two men, the Kid and Ollinger, I know of no better
+types each of his own class. One was a genuine bad man, and the other
+was the genuine imitation of a bad man. They were really as far apart as
+the poles, and they are so held in the tradition of that bloody country
+to-day. Throughout the West there are two sorts of wolves--the coyote
+and the gray wolf. Either will kill, and both are lovers of blood. One
+is yellow at heart, and the other is game all the way through. In
+outward appearance both are wolves, and in appearance they sometimes
+grade toward each other so closely that it is hard to determine the
+species. The gray wolf is a warrior and is respected. The coyote is a
+sneak and a murderer, and his name is a term of reproach throughout the
+West.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+
+The Land of the Desperado--_The Frontier of the Old West_--_The Great
+Unsettled Regions_--_The Desperado of the Mountains_--_His Brother of
+the Plains_--_The Desperado of the Early Railroad Towns_.
+
+
+There was once a vast empire, almost unknown, west of the Missouri
+river. The white civilization of this continent was three hundred years
+in reaching it. We had won our independence and taken our place among
+the nations of the world before our hardiest men had learned anything
+whatever of this Western empire. We had bought this vast region and were
+paying for it before we knew what we had purchased. The wise men of the
+East, leading men in Congress, said that it would be criminal to add
+this territory to our already huge domain, because it could never be
+settled. It was not dreamed that civilization would ever really subdue
+it. Even much later, men as able as Daniel Webster deplored the attempt
+to extend our lines farther to the West, saying that these territories
+could not be States, that the East would suffer if we widened our West,
+and that the latter could never be of value to the union! So far as this
+great West was concerned, it was spurned and held in contempt, and it
+had full right to take itself as an outcast. Decreed to the wilderness
+forever, it could have been forgiven for running wild. Denominated as
+unfit for the occupation of the Eastern population, it might have been
+expected that it would gather to itself a population all its own.
+
+It did gather such a population, and in part that population was a
+lawless one. The frontier, clear across to the Pacific, has at one time
+or another been lawless; but this was not always the fault of the men
+who occupied the frontier. The latter swept Westward with such
+unexampled swiftness that the machinery of the law could not always keep
+up with them. Where there are no courts, where each man is judge and
+jury for himself, protecting himself and his property by his own arm
+alone, there always have gathered also the lawless, those who do not
+wish the day of law to come, men who want license and not liberty, who
+wish crime and not lawfulness, who want to take what is not theirs and
+to enforce their own will in their own fashion.
+
+"There are two states of society perhaps equally bad for the promotion
+of good morals and virtue--the densely populated city and the
+wilderness. In the former, a single individual loses his identity in the
+mass, and, being unnoticed, is without the view of the public, and can,
+to a certain extent, commit crimes with impunity. In the latter, the
+population is sparse and, the strong arm of the law not being extended,
+his crimes are in a measure unobserved, or, if so, frequently power is
+wanting to bring him to justice. Hence, both are the resort of
+desperadoes. In the early settlement of the West, the borders were
+infested with desperadoes flying from justice, suspected or convicted
+felons escaped from the grasp of the law, who sought safety. The
+counterfeiter and the robber there found a secure retreat or a new
+theater for crime."
+
+The foregoing words were written in 1855 by a historian to whom the West
+of the trans-Missouri remained still a sealed book; but they cover very
+fitly the appeal of a wild and unknown land to a bold, a criminal, or
+an adventurous population. Of the trans-Missouri as we of to-day think
+of it, no one can write more accurately and understandingly than
+Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States, who thus describes
+the land he knew and loved.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: "The Wilderness Hunters." G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York and
+London.]
+
+     "Some distance beyond the Mississippi, stretching from Texas to
+     North Dakota, and westward to the Rocky mountains, lies the plains
+     country. This is a region of light rainfall, where the ground is
+     clad with short grass, while cottonwood trees fringe the courses of
+     the winding plains streams; streams that are alternately turbid
+     torrents and mere dwindling threads of water. The great stretches
+     of natural pasture are broken by gray sage-brush plains, and tracts
+     of strangely shaped and colored Bad Lands; sun-scorched wastes in
+     summer, and in winter arctic in their iron desolation. Beyond the
+     plains rise the Rocky mountains, their flanks covered with
+     coniferous woods; but the trees are small, and do not ordinarily
+     grow very close together. Toward the north the forest becomes
+     denser, and the peaks higher; and glaciers creep down toward the
+     valleys from the fields of everlasting snow. The brooks are
+     brawling, trout-filled torrents; the swift rivers roam over rapid
+     and cataract, on their way to one or other of the two great oceans.
+
+     "Southwest of the Rockies evil and terrible deserts stretch for
+     leagues and leagues, mere waterless wastes of sandy plain and
+     barren mountain, broken here and there by narrow strips of fertile
+     ground. Rain rarely falls, and there are no clouds to dim the
+     brazen sun. The rivers run in deep canyons, or are swallowed by the
+     burning sand; the smaller watercourses are dry throughout the
+     greater part of the year.
+
+     "Beyond this desert region rise the sunny Sierras of California,
+     with their flower-clad slopes and groves of giant trees; and north
+     of them, along the coast, the rain-shrouded mountain chains of
+     Oregon and Washington, matted with the towering growth of the
+     mighty evergreen forest."
+
+Such, then, was this Western land, so long the home of the out-dweller
+who foreran civilization, and who sometimes took matters of the law into
+his own hands. For purposes of convenience, we may classify him as the
+bad man of the mountains and the bad man of the plains; because he was
+usually found in and around the crude localities where raw resources in
+property were being developed; and because, previous to the advent of
+agriculture, the two vast wilderness resources were minerals and cattle.
+The mines of California and the Rockies; the cattle of the great
+plains--write the story of these and you have much of the story of
+Western desperadoism. For, in spite of the fact that the ideal desperado
+was one who did not rob or kill for gain, the most usual form of early
+desperadoism had to do with attempts at unlawfully acquiring another
+man's property.
+
+The discovery of gold in California caused a flood of bold men, good and
+bad, to pour into that remote region from all corners of the earth.
+Books could be written, and have been written, on the days of terror in
+California, when the Vigilantes took the law into their own hands. There
+came the time later when the rich placers of Montana and other
+territories were pouring out a stream of gold rivaling that of the days
+of '49; and when a tide of restless and reckless characters, resigning
+or escaping from both armies in the Civil War, mingled with many others
+who heard also the imperious call of a land of gold, and rolled
+westward across the plains by every means of conveyance or locomotion
+then possible to man.
+
+The next great days of the wild West were the cattle days, which also
+reached their height soon after the end of the great war, when the North
+was seeking new lands for its young men, and the Southwest was hunting
+an outlet for the cattle herds, which had enormously multiplied while
+their owners were off at the wars. The cattle country had been passed
+over unnoticed by the mining men for many years, and dismissed as the
+Great American Desert, as it had been named by the first explorers, who
+were almost as ignorant about the West as Daniel Webster himself. Into
+this once barren land, a vast region unsettled and without law, there
+now came pouring up the great herds of cattle from the South, in charge
+of men wild as the horned kine they drove. Here was another great wild
+land that drew, as a magnet, wild men from all parts of the country.
+
+This last home of the bad man, the old cattle range, is covered by a
+passage from an earlier work:[B]
+
+     "The braiding of a hundred minor pathways, the Long Trail lay like
+     a vast rope connecting the cattle country of the South with that of
+     the North. Lying loose or coiling, it ran for more than two
+     thousand miles along the eastern ridge of the Rocky mountains,
+     sometimes close in at their feet, again hundreds of miles away
+     across the hard table-lands or the well-flowered prairies. It
+     traversed in a fair line the vast land of Texas, curled over the
+     Indian Nations, over Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming and
+     Montana, and bent in wide overlapping circles as far west as Utah
+     and Nevada; as far east as Missouri, Iowa, Illinois; and as far
+     north as the British possessions. Even to-day you may trace plainly
+     its former course, from its faint beginnings in the lazy land of
+     Mexico, the Ararat of the cattle range. It is distinct across
+     Texas, and multifold still in the Indian lands. Its many
+     intermingling paths still scar the iron surface of the Neutral
+     Strip, and the plows have not buried all the old furrows in the
+     plains of Kansas. Parts of the path still remain visible in the
+     mountain lands of the far North. You may see the ribbons banding
+     the hillsides to-day along the valley of the Stillwater, and along
+     the Yellowstone and toward the source of the Missouri. The hoof
+     marks are beyond the Musselshell, over the Bad Lands and the
+     _coulees_ and the flat prairies; and far up into the land of the
+     long cold you may see, even to-day if you like, the shadow of that
+     unparalleled pathway, the Long Trail of the cattle range. History
+     has no other like it.
+
+     "This was really the dawning of the American cattle industry. The
+     Long Trail now received a gradual but unmistakable extension,
+     always to the north, and along the line of the intermingling of the
+     products of the Spanish and the Anglo-Saxon civilizations. The
+     thrust was always to the north. Chips and flakes of the great
+     Southwestern herd began to be seen in the northern states. Meantime
+     the Anglo-Saxon civilization was rolling swiftly toward the upper
+     West. The Indians were being driven from the plains. A solid army
+     was pressing behind the vanguard of soldier, scout and plainsman.
+     The railroads were pushing out into a new and untracked empire. In
+     1871 over six hundred thousand cattle crossed the Red river for the
+     Northern markets. Abilene, Newton, Wichita, Ellsworth, Great Bend,
+     "Dodge," flared out into a swift and sometime evil blossoming. The
+     Long Trail, which long ago had found the black corn lands of
+     Illinois and Missouri, now crowded to the West, until it had
+     reached Utah and Nevada, and penetrated every open park and _mesa_
+     and valley of Colorado, and found all the high plains of Wyoming.
+     Cheyenne and Laramie became common words now, and drovers spoke
+     wisely of the dangers of the Platte as a year before they had
+     mentioned those of the Red river or the Arkansas. Nor did the Trail
+     pause in its irresistible push to the north until it had found the
+     last of the five great trans-continental lines, far in the British
+     provinces. The Long Trail of the cattle range was done. By magic
+     the cattle industry had spread over the entire West."
+
+[Footnote B: "The Story of the Cowboy," by E. Hough. D. Appleton & Co.,
+New York.]
+
+By magic, also, the cattle industry called to itself a population unique
+and peculiar. Here were great values to be handled and guarded. The
+cowboy appeared, summoned out of the shadows by the demand of evolution.
+With him appeared also the cattle thief, making his living on free beef,
+as he had once on the free buffalo of the plains. The immense domain of
+the West was filled with property held under no better or more obvious
+mark than the imprint of a hot iron on the hide. There were no fences.
+The owner might be a thousand miles away. The temptation to theft was
+continual and urgent. It seemed easy and natural to take a living from
+these great herds which no one seemed to own or to care for. The
+"rustler" of the range made his appearance, bold, hardy, unprincipled;
+and the story of his undoing by the law is precisely that of the finish
+of the robbers of the mines by the Vigilantes.
+
+Now, too, came the days of transition, which have utterly changed all
+the West. The railroad sprang across this great middle country of the
+plains. The intent was to connect the two sides of this continent; but,
+incidentally, and more swiftly than was planned, there was builded a
+great midway empire on the plains, now one of the grandest portions of
+America.
+
+This building of the trans-continental lines was a rude and dangerous
+work. It took out into the West mobs of hard characters, not afraid of
+hard work and hard living. These men would have a certain amount of
+money as wages, and would assuredly spend these wages as they made them;
+hence, the gambler followed the rough settlements at the "head of the
+rails." The murderer, the thief, the prostitute, the social outcast and
+the fleeing criminal went with the gamblers and the toughs. Those were
+the days when it was not polite to ask a man what his name had been
+back in the States. A very large percentage of this population was wild
+and lawless, and it impressed those who joined it instead of being
+altered and improved by them. There were no wilder days in the West than
+those of the early railroad building. Such towns as Newton, Kansas,
+where eleven men were killed in one night; Fort Dodge, where armed
+encounters among cowboys and gamblers, deputies and desperadoes, were
+too frequent to attract attention; Caldwell, on the Indian border; Hays
+City, Abilene, Ellsworth--any of a dozen cow camps, where the head of
+the rails caught the great northern cattle drives, furnished chapters
+lurid enough to take volumes in telling--indeed, perhaps, gave that
+stamp to the West which has been apparently so ineradicable.
+
+These were flourishing times for the Western desperado, and he became
+famous, and, as it were, typical, at about this era. Perhaps this was
+due in part to the fact that the railroads carried with them the
+telegraph and the newspaper, so that records and reports were made of
+what had for many years gone unreported. Now, too, began the influx of
+transients, who saw the wild West hurriedly and wrote of it as a
+strange and dangerous country. The wild citizens of California and
+Montana in mining days passed almost unnoticed except in fiction. The
+wild men of the middle plains now began to have a record in facts, or
+partial facts, as brought to the notice of the reading public which was
+seeking news of the new lands. A strange and turbulent day now drew
+swiftly on.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+
+The Early Outlaw--_The Frontier of the Past Century_--_The Bad Man East
+of the Mississippi River_--_The Great Western Land-Pirate, John A.
+Murrell_--_The Greatest Slave Insurrection Ever Planned_.
+
+
+Before passing to the review of the more modern days of wild life on the
+Western frontier, we shall find it interesting to note a period less
+known, but quite as wild and desperate as any of later times. Indeed, we
+might also say that our own desperadoes could take lessons from their
+ancestors of the past generation who lived in the forests of the
+Mississippi valley.
+
+Those were the days when the South was breaking over the Appalachians
+and exploring the middle and lower West. Adventurers were dropping down
+the old river roads and "traces" across Kentucky, Tennessee, and
+Mississippi, into Louisiana and Texas. The flatboat and keel-boat days
+of the great rivers were at their height, and the population was in
+large part transient, migratory, and bold; perhaps holding a larger per
+cent. of criminals than any Western population since could claim. There
+were no organized systems of common carriers, no accepted roads and
+highways. The great National Road, from Wheeling west across Ohio,
+paused midway of Indiana. Stretching for hundreds of miles in each
+direction was the wilderness, wherein man had always been obliged to
+fend for himself. And, as ever, the wilderness had its own wild deeds.
+Flatboats were halted and robbed; caravans of travelers were attacked;
+lonely wayfarers plodding on horseback were waylaid and murdered. In
+short, the story of that early day shows our first frontiersman no
+novice in crime.
+
+About twenty miles below the mouth of the Wabash river, there was a
+resort of robbers such as might belong to the most lurid dime-novel
+list--the famous Cave-in-the-Rock, in the bank of the Ohio river. This
+cavern was about twenty-five feet in height at its visible opening, and
+it ran back into the bluff two hundred feet, with a width of eighty
+feet. The floor of this natural cavern was fairly flat, so that it
+could be used as a habitation. From this lower cave a sort of aperture
+led up to a second one, immediately above it in the bluff wall, and
+these two natural retreats of wild animals offered attractions to wild
+men which were not unaccepted. It was here that there dwelt for some
+time the famous robber Meason, or Mason, who terrorized the flatboat
+trade of the Ohio at about 1800. Meason was a robber king, a giant in
+stature, and a man of no ordinary brains. He had associated with him his
+two sons and a few other hard characters, who together made a band
+sufficiently strong to attack any party of the size usually making up
+the boat companies of that time, or the average family traveling,
+mounted or on foot, through the forest-covered country of the Ohio
+valley. Meason killed and pillaged pretty much as he liked for a term of
+years, but as travel became too general along the Ohio, he removed to
+the wilder country south of that stream, and began to operate on the old
+"Natchez and Nashville Trace," one of the roadways of the South at that
+time, when the Indian lands were just opening to the early settlers.
+Lower Tennessee and pretty much all of Mississippi made his
+stamping-grounds, and his name became a terror there, as it had been
+along the Ohio. The governor of the State of Mississippi offered a
+reward for his capture, dead or alive; but for a long time he escaped
+all efforts at apprehension. Treachery did the work, as it has usually
+in bringing such bold and dangerous men to book. Two members of his gang
+proved traitors to their chief. Seizing an opportunity they crept behind
+him and drove a tomahawk into his brain. They cut off the head and took
+it along as proof; but as they were displaying this at the seat of
+government, the town of Washington, they themselves were recognized and
+arrested, and were later tried and executed; which ended the Meason
+gang, one of the early and once famous desperado bands.
+
+[Illustration: TYPES OF BORDER BARRICADES]
+
+From the earliest days there have been border counterfeiters of coin.
+One of the first and most remarkable was the noted Sturdevant, who lived
+in lower Illinois, near the Ohio river, in the first quarter of the last
+century. Sturdevant was also something of a robber king, for he could at
+any time wind his horn and summon to his side a hundred armed men. He
+was ostensibly a steady farmer, and lived comfortably, with a good corps
+of servants and tenants about him; but his ablest assistants did not
+dwell so close to him. He had an army of confederates all over the
+middle West and South, and issued more counterfeit money than any man
+before, and probably than any man since. He always exacted a regular
+price for his money--sixteen dollars for a hundred in counterfeit--and
+such was the looseness of currency matters at that time that he found
+many willing to take a chance in his trade. He never allowed any
+confederate to pass a counterfeit bill in his own state, or in any other
+way to bring himself under the surveillance of local law; and they were
+all obliged to be especially circumspect in the county where they lived.
+He was a very smug sort of villain, in the trade strictly for revenue,
+and he was so careful that he was never caught by the law, in spite of
+the fact that it was known that his farm was the source of a flood of
+spurious money. He was finally "regulated" by the citizens, who arose
+and made him leave the country. This was one of the early applications
+of lynch law in the West. Its results were, as usual, salutary. There
+was no more counterfeiting in that region.
+
+A very noted desperado of these early days was Harpe, or Big Harpe, as
+he was called, to distinguish him from his brother and associate,
+Little Harpe. Big Harpe made a wide region of the Ohio valley dangerous
+to travelers. The events connected with his vicious life are thus given
+by that always interesting old-time chronicler, Henry Howe:
+
+     "In the fall of the year 1801 or 1802, a company consisting of two
+     men and three women arrived in Lincoln county, Ky., and encamped
+     about a mile from the present town of Stanford. The appearance of
+     the individuals composing this party was wild and rude in the
+     extreme. The one who seemed to be the leader of the band was above
+     the ordinary stature of men. His frame was bony and muscular, his
+     breast broad, his limbs gigantic. His clothing was uncouth and
+     shabby, his exterior weather-beaten and dirty, indicating continual
+     exposure to the elements, and designating him as one who dwelt far
+     from the habitations of men, and mingled not in the courtesies of
+     civilized life. His countenance was bold and ferocious, and
+     exceedingly repulsive, from its strongly marked expression of
+     villainy. His face, which was larger than ordinary, exhibited the
+     lines of ungovernable passion, and the complexion announced that
+     the ordinary feelings of the human breast were in him
+     extinguished. Instead of the healthy hue which indicates the social
+     emotions, there was a livid, unnatural redness, resembling that of
+     a dried and lifeless skin. His eye was fearless and steady, but it
+     was also artful and audacious, glaring upon the beholder with an
+     unpleasant fixedness and brilliancy, like that of a ravenous animal
+     gloating on its prey. He wore no covering on his head, and the
+     natural protection of thick, coarse hair, of a fiery redness,
+     uncombed and matted, gave evidence of long exposure to the rudest
+     visitations of the sunbeam and the tempest. He was armed with a
+     rifle, and a broad leathern belt, drawn closely around his waist,
+     supported a knife and a tomahawk. He seemed, in short, an outlaw,
+     destitute of all the nobler sympathies of human nature, and
+     prepared at all points of assault or defense. The other man was
+     smaller in size than him who lead the party, but similarly armed,
+     having the same suspicious exterior, and a countenance equally
+     fierce and sinister. The females were coarse and wretchedly
+     attired.
+
+     "These men stated in answer to the inquiry of the inhabitants, that
+     their name was Harpe, and that they were emigrants from North
+     Carolina. They remained at their encampment the greater part of
+     two days and a night, spending the time in rioting, drunkenness and
+     debauchery. When they left, they took the road leading to Green
+     river. The day succeeding their departure, a report reached the
+     neighborhood that a young gentleman of wealth from Virginia, named
+     Lankford, had been robbed and murdered on what was then called and
+     is still known as the "Wilderness Road," which runs through the
+     Rock-castle hills. Suspicion immediately fixed upon the Harpes as
+     the perpetrators, and Captain Ballenger at the head of a few bold
+     and resolute men, started in pursuit. They experienced great
+     difficulty in following their trail, owing to a heavy fall of snow,
+     which obliterated most of their tracks, but finally came upon them
+     while encamped in a bottom on Green river, near the spot where the
+     town of Liberty now stands. At first they made a show of
+     resistance, but upon being informed that if they did not
+     immediately surrender, they would be shot down, they yielded
+     themselves prisoners. They were brought back to Stanford, and there
+     examined. Among their effects were found some fine linen shirts,
+     marked with the initials of Lankford. One had been pierced by a
+     bullet and was stained with blood. They had also a considerable
+     sum of money in gold. It was afterward ascertained that this was
+     the kind of money Lankford had with him. The evidence against them
+     being thus conclusive, they were confined in the Stanford jail, but
+     were afterward sent for trial to Danville, where the district court
+     was in session. Here they broke jail, and succeeded in making their
+     escape.
+
+     "They were next heard of in Adair county, near Columbia. In passing
+     through the country, they met a small boy, the son of Colonel
+     Trabue, with a pillow-case of meal or flour, an article they
+     probably needed. This boy, it is supposed they robbed and then
+     murdered, as he was never afterward heard of. Many years afterward
+     human bones answering the size of Colonel Trabue's son at the time
+     of his disappearance, were found in a sink hole near the place
+     where he was said to have been murdered.
+
+     "The Harpes still shaped their course toward the mouth of Green
+     river, marking their path by murders and robberies of the most
+     horrible and brutal character. The district of country through
+     which they passed was at that time very thinly settled, and from
+     this reason, their outrages went unpunished. They seemed inspired
+     with the deadliest hatred against the whole human race, and such
+     was their implacable misanthropy, that they were known to kill
+     where there was no temptation to rob. One of their victims was a
+     little girl, found at some distance from her home, whose tender age
+     and helplessness would have been protection against any but
+     incarnate fiends. The last dreadful act of barbarity, which led to
+     their punishment and expulsion from the country, exceeded in
+     atrocity all the others.
+
+     "Assuming the guise of Methodist preachers, they obtained lodgings
+     one night at a solitary house on the road. Mr. Stagall, the master
+     of the house, was absent, but they found his wife and children, and
+     a stranger, who, like themselves, had stopped for the night. Here
+     they conversed and made inquiries about the two noted Harpes who
+     were represented as prowling about the country. When they retired
+     to rest, they contrived to secure an axe, which they carried with
+     them into their chamber. In the dead of night, they crept softly
+     down stairs, and assassinated the whole family, together with the
+     stranger, in their sleep, and then setting fire to the house, made
+     their escape. When Stagall returned, he found no wife to welcome
+     him; no home to receive him. Distracted with grief and rage, he
+     turned his horse's head from the smoldering ruins, and repaired to
+     the house of Captain John Leeper. Leeper was one of the most
+     powerful men in his day, and fearless as powerful. Collecting four
+     or five men well armed, they mounted and started in pursuit of
+     vengeance. It was agreed that Leeper should attack 'Big Harpe,'
+     leaving 'Little Harpe' to be disposed of by Stagall. The others
+     were to hold themselves in readiness to assist Leeper and Stagall,
+     as circumstances might require.
+
+     "This party found the women belonging to the Harpes, attending to
+     their little camp by the roadside; the men having gone aside into
+     the woods to shoot an unfortunate traveler, of the name of Smith,
+     who had fallen into their hands, and whom the women had begged
+     might not be dispatched before their eyes. It was this halt that
+     enabled the pursuers to overtake them. The women immediately gave
+     the alarm, and the miscreants mounting their horses, which were
+     large, fleet and powerful, fled in separate directions. Leeper
+     singled out the 'Big Harpe,' and being better mounted than his
+     companions, soon left them far behind. 'Little Harpe' succeeded in
+     escaping from Stagall, and he, with the rest of his companions,
+     turned and followed on the track of Leeper and the 'Big Harpe.'
+     After a chase of about nine miles, Leeper came within gun-shot of
+     the latter and fired. The ball entering his thigh, passed through
+     it and penetrated his horse and both fell. Harpe's gun escaped from
+     his hand and rolled some eight or ten feet down the bank. Reloading
+     his rifle, Leeper ran to where the wounded outlaw lay weltering in
+     his blood, and found him with one thigh broken, and the other
+     crushed beneath his horse. Leeper rolled the horse away, and set
+     Harpe in an easier position. The robber begged that he might not be
+     killed. Leeper told him that he had nothing to fear from him, but
+     that Stagall was coming up, and could not probably be restrained.
+     Harpe appeared very much frightened at hearing this, and implored
+     Leeper to protect him. In a few moments, Stagall appeared, and
+     without uttering a word, raised his rifle and shot Harpe through
+     the head. They then severed the head from the body, and stuck it
+     upon a pole where the road crosses the creek, from which the place
+     was then named and is yet called Harpe's Head. Thus perished one of
+     the boldest and most noted freebooters that has ever appeared in
+     America. Save courage, he was without one redeeming quality, and
+     his death freed the country from a terror which had long paralyzed
+     its boldest spirits.
+
+     "The 'Little Harpe' afterward joined the band of Meason, and became
+     one of his most valuable assistants in the dreadful trade of
+     robbery and murder. He was one of the two bandits that, tempted by
+     the reward for their leader's head, murdered him, and eventually
+     themselves suffered the penalty of the law as previously related."
+
+Thus it would seem that the first quarter of the last century on the
+frontier was not without its own interest. The next decade, or that
+ending about 1840, however, offered a still greater instance of
+outlawry, one of the most famous ones indeed of American history,
+although little known to-day. This had to do with that genius in crime,
+John A. Murrell, long known as the great Western land-pirate; and surely
+no pirate of the seas was ever more enterprising or more dangerous.
+
+Murrell was another man who, in a decent walk of life, would have been
+called great. He had more than ordinary energy and intellect. He was not
+a mere brute, but a shrewd, cunning, scheming man, hesitating at no
+crime on earth, yet animated by a mind so bold that mere personal crime
+was not enough for him. When it is added that he had a gang of robbers
+and murderers associated with him who were said to number nearly two
+thousand men, and who were scattered over the entire South below the
+Ohio river, it may be seen how bold were his plans; and his ability may
+further be shown in the fact that for years these men lived among and
+mingled with their fellows in civil life, unknown and unsuspected. Some
+of them were said to have been of the best families of the land; and
+even yet there come to light strange and romantic tales, perhaps not
+wholly true, of death-bed confessions of men prominent in the South who
+admitted that once they belonged to Murrell's gang, but had later
+repented and reformed. A prominent Kentucky lawyer was one of these.
+
+Murrell and his confederates would steal horses and mules, or at least
+the common class, or division, known as the "strikers," would do so,
+although the members of the Grand Council would hardly stoop to so petty
+a crime. For them was reserved the murdering of travelers or settlers
+who were supposed to have money, and the larger operations of negro
+stealing.
+
+The theft of slaves, the claiming of the runaway rewards, the later
+re-stealing and re-selling and final killing of the negro in order to
+destroy the evidence, are matters which Murrell reduced to a system that
+has no parallel in the criminal records of the country. But not even
+here did this daring outlaw pause. It was not enough to steal a negro
+here and there, and to make a few thousand dollars out of each negro so
+handled. The whole state of organized society was to be overthrown by
+means of this same black population. So at least goes one story of his
+life. We know of several so-called black insurrections that were planned
+at one time or another in the South--as, for instance, the Turner
+insurrection in Virginia; but this Murrell enterprise was the biggest of
+them all.
+
+The plan was to have the uprising occur all over the South on the same
+day, Christmas of 1835. The blacks were to band together and march on
+the settlements, after killing all the whites on the farms where they
+worked. There they were to fall under the leadership of Murrell's
+lieutenants, who were to show them how to sack the stores, to kill the
+white merchants, and take the white women. The banks of all the Southern
+towns were to become the property of Murrell and his associates. In
+short, at one stroke, the entire system of government, which had been
+established after such hard effort in that fierce wilderness along the
+old Southern "traces," was to be wiped out absolutely. The land was
+indeed to be left without law. The entire fruits of organized society
+were to belong to a band of outlaws. This was probably the best and
+boldest instance ever seen of the narrowness of the line dividing
+society and savagery.
+
+Murrell was finally brought to book by his supposed confederate, Virgil
+A. Stewart, the spy, who went under the name of Hues, whose evidence,
+after many difficulties, no doubt resulted in the breaking up of this,
+the largest and most dangerous band of outlaws this country ever saw;
+although Stewart himself was a vain and ambitious notoriety seeker.
+Supposing himself safe, Murrell gave Stewart a detailed story of his
+life. This was later used in evidence against him; and although
+Stewart's account needs qualification, it is the best and fullest record
+obtainable to-day.[C]
+
+[Footnote C: "Life and Adventures of Virgil A. Stewart." Harper and
+Brothers, New York. 1836.]
+
+"I was born in Middle Tennessee," Murrell personally stated. "My
+parents had not much property, but they were intelligent people; and my
+father was an honest man I expect, and tried to raise me honest, but I
+think none the better of him for that. My mother was of the pure grit;
+she learned me and all her children to steal as soon as we could walk
+and would hide for us whenever she could. At ten years old I was not a
+bad hand. The first good haul I made was from a pedler who lodged at my
+father's house one night.
+
+"I began to look after larger spoils and ran several fine horses. By the
+time I was twenty I began to acquire considerable character, and
+concluded to go off and do my speculation where I was not known, and go
+on a larger scale; so I began to see the value of having friends in this
+business. I made several associates; I had been acquainted with some old
+hands for a long time, who had given me the names of some royal fellows
+between Nashville and Tuscaloosa, and between Nashville and Savannah in
+the state of Georgia and many other places. Myself and a fellow by the
+name of Crenshaw gathered four good horses and started for Georgia. We
+got in company with a young South Carolinian just before we reached
+Cumberland Mountain, and Crenshaw soon knew all about his business. He
+had been to Tennessee to buy a drove of hogs, but when he got there pork
+was dearer than he calculated, and he declined purchasing. We concluded
+he was a prize. Crenshaw winked at me; I understood his idea. Crenshaw
+had traveled the road before, but I never had; we had traveled several
+miles on the mountain, when we passed near a great precipice; just
+before we passed it, Crenshaw asked me for my whip, which had a pound of
+lead in the butt; I handed it to him, and he rode up by the side of the
+South Carolinian, and gave him a blow on the side of the head, and
+tumbled him from his horse; we lit from our horses and fingered his
+pockets; we got twelve hundred and sixty-two dollars. Crenshaw said he
+knew of a place to hide him, and gathered him under the arms, and I by
+his feet, and conveyed him to a deep crevice in the brow of the
+precipice, and tumbled him into it; he went out of sight. We then
+tumbled in his saddle, and took his horse with us, which was worth two
+hundred dollars. We turned our course for South Alabama, and sold our
+horse for a good price. We frolicked for a week or more and were the
+highest larks you ever saw. We commenced sporting and gambling, and
+lost every cent of our money.
+
+"We were forced to resort to our profession for a second raise. We stole
+a negro man, and pushed for Mississippi. We had promised him that we
+would conduct him to a free state if he would let us sell him once as we
+went on our way; we also agreed to give him part of the money. We sold
+him for six hundred dollars; but, when we went to start, the negro
+seemed to be very uneasy, and appeared to doubt our coming back for him
+as we had promised. We lay in a creek bottom, not far from the place
+where we had sold the negro, all the next day, and after dark we went to
+the china-tree in the lane where we were to meet Tom; he had been
+waiting for some time. He mounted his horse, and we pushed with him a
+second time. We rode twenty miles that night to the house of a friendly
+speculator. I had seen him in Tennessee, and had given him several
+lifts. He gave me his place of residence, that I might find him when I
+was passing. He is quite rich, and one of the best kind of fellows. Our
+horses were fed as much as they would eat, and two of them were
+foundered the next morning. We were detained a few days, and during that
+time our friend went to a little village in the neighborhood, and saw
+the negro advertised, with a description of the two men of whom he had
+been purchased, and with mention of them as suspicious personages. It
+was rather squally times, but any port in a storm; we took the negro
+that night to the bank of a creek which runs by the farm of our friend,
+and Crenshaw shot him through the head. We took out his entrails and
+sunk him in the creek; our friend furnished us with one fine horse, and
+we left him our foundered horses. We made our way through the Choctaw
+and Chickasaw Nations, and then to Williamson county, in this state. We
+should have made a fine trip if we had taken care of all we got.
+
+"I had become a considerable libertine, and when I returned home I spent
+a few months rioting in all the luxuries of forbidden pleasures with the
+girls of my acquaintance. My stock of cash was soon gone, and I put to
+my shift for more. I commenced with horses, and ran several from the
+adjoining counties. I had got associated with a young man who had
+professed to be a preacher among the Methodists, and a sharper he was;
+he was as slick on the tongue as goose-grease. I took my first lessons
+in divinity from this young preacher. He was highly respected by all
+who knew him, and well calculated to please; he first put me in the
+notion of preaching, to aid me in my speculations.
+
+"I got into difficulty about a mare that I had taken, and was imprisoned
+for near three years. I shifted it from court to court, but was at last
+found guilty, and whipped. During my confinement I read the scriptures,
+and became a good judge of theology. I had not neglected the criminal
+laws for many years before that time. When they turned me loose I was
+prepared for anything; I wanted to kill all but those of my own grit;
+and I will die by the side of one of them before I will desert.
+
+"My next speculation was in the Choctaw region; myself and brother stole
+two fine horses, and made our way into this country. We got in with an
+old negro man and his wife, and three sons, to go off with us to Texas,
+and promised them that, if they would work for us one year after we got
+there, we would let them go free, and told them many fine stories. The
+old negro became suspicious that we were going to sell him, and grew
+quite contrary; so we landed one day by the side of an island, and I
+requested him to go with me round the point of the island to hunt a
+good place to catch some fish. After we were hidden from our company I
+shot him through the head, and then ripped open his belly and tumbled
+him into the river. I returned to my company, and told them that the
+negro had fallen into the river, and that he never came up after he went
+under. We landed fifty miles above New Orleans, and went into the
+country and sold our negroes to a Frenchman for nineteen hundred
+dollars.
+
+"We went from where we sold the negroes to New Orleans, and dressed
+ourselves like young lords. I mixed with the loose characters at the
+_swamp_ every night. One night, as I was returning to the tavern where I
+boarded, I was stopped by two armed men, who demanded my money. I handed
+them my pocketbook, and observed that I was very happy to meet with
+them, as we were all of the same profession. One of them observed, 'D--d
+if I ever rob a brother chip. We have had our eyes on you and the man
+that has generally come with you for several nights; we saw so much
+rigging and glittering jewelry, that we concluded you must be some
+wealthy dandy, with a surplus of cash; and had determined to rid you of
+the trouble of some of it; but, if you are a robber, here is your
+pocketbook, and you must go with us to-night, and we will give you an
+introduction to several fine fellows of the block; but stop, do you
+understand this motion?' I answered it, and thanked them for their
+kindness, and turned with them. We went to old Mother Surgick's, and had
+a real frolic with her girls. That night was the commencement of my
+greatness in what the world calls villainy. The two fellows who robbed
+me were named Haines and Phelps; they made me known to all the
+speculators that visited New Orleans, and gave me the name of every
+fellow who would speculate that lived on the Mississippi river, and many
+of its tributary streams, from New Orleans up to all the large Western
+cities.
+
+"I had become acquainted with a Kentuckian, who boarded at the same
+tavern I did, and I suspected he had a large sum of money; I felt an
+inclination to count it for him before I left the city; so I made my
+notions known to Phelps and my other new comrades, and concerted our
+plan. I was to get him off to the _swamp_ with me on a spree, and when
+we were returning to our lodgings, my friends were to meet us and rob us
+both. I had got very intimate with the Kentuckian, and he thought me one
+of the best fellows in the world. He was very fond of wine; and I had
+him well fumed with good wine before I made the proposition for a
+frolic. When I invited him to walk with me he readily accepted the
+invitation. We cut a few shines with the girls, and started to the
+tavern. We were met by a band of robbers, and robbed of all our money.
+The Kentuckian was so mad that he cursed the whole city, and wished that
+it would all be deluged in a flood of water so soon as he left the
+place. I went to my friends the next morning, and got my share of the
+spoil money, and my pocketbook that I had been robbed of. We got seven
+hundred and fifty dollars of the bold Kentuckian, which was divided
+among thirteen of us.
+
+"I commenced traveling and making all the acquaintances among the
+speculators that I could. I went from New Orleans to Cincinnati, and
+from there I visited Lexington, in Kentucky. I found a speculator about
+four miles from Newport, who furnished me with a fine horse the second
+night after I arrived at his house. I went from Lexington to Richmond,
+in Virginia, and from there I visited Charleston, in the State of South
+Carolina; and from thence to Milledgeville, by the way of Savannah and
+Augusta, in the State of Georgia. I made my way from Milledgeville to
+Williamson county, the old stamping-ground. In all the route I only
+robbed eleven men but I preached some fine sermons, and scattered some
+counterfeit United States paper among my brethren.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"After I returned home from the first grand circuit I made among my
+speculators, I remained there but a short time, as I could not rest when
+my mind was not actively engaged in some speculation. I commenced the
+foundation of this mystic clan on that tour, and suggested the plan of
+exciting a rebellion among the negroes, as the sure road to an
+inexhaustible fortune to all who would engage in the expedition. The
+first mystic sign which is used by this clan was in use among robbers
+before I was born; and the second had its origin from myself, Phelps,
+Haines, Cooper, Doris, Bolton, Harris, Doddridge, Celly, Morris, Walton,
+Depont, and one of my brothers, on the second night after my
+acquaintance with them in New Orleans. We needed a higher order to carry
+on our designs, and we adopted our sign, and called it the sign of the
+Grand Council of the Mystic Clan; and practised ourselves to give and
+receive the new sign to a fraction before we parted; and, in addition to
+this improvement, we invented and formed a mode of corresponding, by
+means of ten characters, mixed with other matter, which has been very
+convenient on many occasions, and especially when any of us get into
+difficulties. I was encouraged in my new undertaking, and my heart began
+to beat high with the hope of being able one day to visit the pomp of
+the Southern and Western people in my vengeance; and of seeing their
+cities and towns one common scene of devastation, smoked walls and
+fragments.
+
+"I decoyed a negro man from his master in Middle Tennessee, and sent him
+to Mill's Point by a young man, and I waited to see the movements of the
+owner. He thought his negro had run off. So I started to take possession
+of my prize. I got another friend at Mill's Point to take my negro in a
+skiff, and convey him to the mouth of Red river, while I took passage on
+a steamboat. I then went through the country by land, and sold my negro
+for nine hundred dollars, and the second night after I sold him I stole
+him again, and my friend ran him to the Irish bayou in Texas; I
+followed on after him, and sold my negro in Texas for five hundred
+dollars. I then resolved to visit South America, and see if there was an
+opening in that country for a speculation; I had also concluded that I
+could get some strong friends in that quarter to aid me in my designs
+relative to a negro rebellion; but of all people in the world, the
+Spaniards are the most treacherous and cowardly; I never want them
+concerned in any matter with me; I had rather take the negroes in this
+country to fight than a Spaniard. I stopped in a village, and passed as
+a doctor, and commenced practising medicine. I could ape the doctor
+first-rate, having read Ewel, and several other works on primitive
+medicine. I became a great favorite of an old Catholic; he adopted me as
+his son in the faith, and introduced me to all the best families as a
+young doctor from North America. I had been with the old Catholic but a
+very short time before I was a great Roman Catholic, and bowed to the
+cross, and attended regularly to all the ceremonies of that persuasion;
+and, to tell you the fact, Hues, all the Catholic religion needs to be
+universally received, is to be correctly represented; but you know I
+care nothing for religion. I had been with the old Catholic about three
+months, and was getting a heavy practice, when an opportunity offered
+for me to rob the good man's secretary of nine hundred and sixty dollars
+in gold, and I could have got as much more in silver if I could have
+carried it. I was soon on the road for home again; I stopped three weeks
+in New Orleans as I came home, and had some high fun with old Mother
+Surgick's girls.
+
+"I collected all my associates in New Orleans at one of my friend's
+houses in that place, and we sat in council three days before we got all
+our plans to our notion; we then determined to undertake the rebellion
+at every hazard, and make as many friends as we could for that purpose.
+Every man's business being assigned him, I started for Natchez on foot.
+Having sold my horse in New Orleans with the intention of stealing
+another after I started, I walked four days, and no opportunity offered
+for me to get a horse. The fifth day, about twelve o'clock, I had become
+very tired, and stopped at a creek to get some water and rest a little.
+While I was sitting on a log, looking down the road I had come, a man
+came in sight riding a good-looking horse. The very moment I saw him I
+determined to have his horse if he was in the garb of a traveler. He
+rode up, and I saw from his equipage that he was a traveler. I arose
+from my seat and drew an elegant rifle pistol on him, and ordered him to
+dismount. He did so, and I took his horse by the bridle, and pointed
+down the creek, and ordered him to walk before me. We went a few hundred
+yards and stopped. I hitched his horse, then made him undress himself,
+all to his shirt and drawers, and ordered him to turn his back to me. He
+asked me if I was going to shoot him. I ordered him the second time to
+turn his back to me. He said, 'If you are determined to kill me, let me
+have time to pray before I die.' I told him I had no time to hear him
+pray. He turned round and dropped on his knees, and I shot him through
+the back of the head. I ripped open his belly, and took out his
+entrails, and sunk him in the creek. I then searched his pockets, and
+found four hundred and one dollars and thirty-seven cents, and a number
+of papers that I did not take time to examine. I sunk the pocketbook and
+papers and his hat in the creek. His boots were brand new, and fitted me
+very genteelly, and I put them on, and sunk my old shoes in the creek to
+atone for them. I rolled up his clothes and put them into his
+portmanteau, as they were quite new cloth of the best quality. I mounted
+as fine a horse as ever I straddled, and directed my course to Natchez
+in much better style than I had been for the last five days.
+
+"I reached Natchez, and spent two days with my friends at that place and
+the girls under the Hill together. I then left Natchez for the Choctaw
+nation, with the intention of giving some of them a chance for their
+property. As I was riding along between Benton and Rankin, planning for
+my designs, I was overtaken by a tall and good-looking young man, riding
+an elegant horse, which was splendidly rigged off; and the young
+gentleman's apparel was of the gayest that could be had, and his
+watch-chain and other jewelry were of the richest and best. I was
+anxious to know if he intended to travel through the Choctaw nation, and
+soon managed to learn. He said he had been to the lower country with a
+drove of negroes, and was returning home to Kentucky. We rode on, and
+soon got very intimate for strangers, and agreed to be company through
+the Indian nation. We were two fine-looking men, and, to hear us talk,
+we were very rich. I felt him on the subject of speculation, but he
+cursed the speculators, and said he was in a bad condition to fall into
+the hands of such villains, as he had the cash with him that twenty
+negroes had sold for; and that he was very happy that he happened to get
+in company with me through the nation. I concluded he was a noble prize,
+and longed to be counting his cash. At length we came into one of those
+long stretches in the Nation, where there was no house for twenty miles,
+on the third day after we had been in company with each other. The
+country was high, hilly, and broken, and no water; just about the time I
+reached the place where I intended to count my companion's cash, I
+became very thirsty, and insisted on turning down a deep hollow, or
+dale, that headed near the road, to hunt some water. We had followed
+down the dale for near four hundred yards, when I drew my pistol and
+shot him through. He fell dead; I commenced hunting for his cash, and
+opened his large pocketbook, which was stuffed very full; and when I
+began to open it I thought it was a treasure indeed; but oh! the
+contents of that book! it was richly filled with the copies of
+love-songs, the forms of love-letters, and some of his own
+composition,--but no cash. I began to cut off his clothes with my knife,
+and examine them for his money. I found four dollars and a half in
+change in his pockets, and no more. And is this the amount for which
+twenty negroes sold? thought I. I recollected his watch and jewelry, and
+I gathered them in; his chain was rich and good, but it was swung to an
+old brass watch. He was a puff for true, and I thought all such fools
+ought to die as soon as possible. I took his horse, and swapped him to
+an Indian native for four ponies, and sold them on the way home. I
+reached home, and spent a few weeks among the girls of my acquaintance,
+in all the enjoyments that money could afford.
+
+"My next trip was through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina,
+Virginia, and Maryland, and then back to South Carolina, and from there
+round by Florida and Alabama. I began to conduct the progress of my
+operations, and establish my emissaries over the country in every
+direction.
+
+"I have been going ever since from one place to another, directing and
+managing; but I have others now as good as myself to manage. This
+fellow, Phelps, that I was telling you of before, he is a noble chap
+among the negroes, and he wants them all free; he knows how to excite
+them as well as any person; but he will not do for a robber, as he
+cannot kill a man unless he has received an injury from him first. He is
+now in jail at Vicksburg, and I fear will hang. I went to see him not
+long since, but he is so strictly watched that nothing can be done. He
+has been in the habit of stopping men on the highway, and robbing them,
+and letting them go on; but that will never do for a robber; after I rob
+a man he will never give evidence against me, and there is but one safe
+plan in the business, and that is to kill--if I could not afford to kill
+a man, I would not rob.
+
+"The great object that we have in contemplation is to excite a rebellion
+among the negroes throughout the slave-holding states. Our plan is to
+manage so as to have it commence everywhere at the same hour. We have
+set on the 25th of December, 1835, for the time to commence our
+operations. We design having our companies so stationed over the
+country, in the vicinity of the banks and large cities, that when the
+negroes commence their carnage and slaughter, we will have detachments
+to fire the towns and rob the banks while all is confusion and dismay.
+The rebellion taking place everywhere at the same time, every part of
+the country will be engaged in its own defence; and one part of the
+country can afford no relief to another, until many places will be
+entirely overrun by the negroes, and our pockets replenished from the
+banks and the desks of rich merchants' houses. It is true that in many
+places in the slave states the negro population is not strong, and would
+be easily overpowered; but, back them with a few resolute leaders from
+our clan, they will murder thousands, and huddle the remainder into
+large bodies of stationary defence for their own preservation; and then,
+in many other places, the black population is much the strongest, and
+under a leader would overrun the country before any steps could be taken
+to suppress them.
+
+"We do not go to every negro we see and tell him that the negroes intend
+to rebel on the night of the 25th of December, 1835. We find the most
+vicious and wickedly disposed on large farms, and poison their minds by
+telling them how they are mistreated. When we are convinced that we have
+found a bloodthirsty devil, we swear him to secrecy and disclose to him
+the secret, and convince him that every other state and section of
+country where there are any negroes intend to rebel and slay all the
+whites they can on the night of the 25th of December, 1835, and assure
+him that there are thousands of white men engaged in trying to free
+them, who will die by their sides in battle. We have a long ceremony for
+the oath, which is administered in the presence of a terrific picture
+painted for that purpose, representing the monster who is to deal with
+him should he prove unfaithful in the engagements he has entered into.
+This picture is highly calculated to make a negro true to his trust, for
+he is disposed to be superstitious at best.
+
+"Our black emissaries have the promise of a share in the spoils we may
+gain, and we promise to conduct them to Texas should we be defeated,
+where they will be free; but we never talk of being defeated. We always
+talk of victory and wealth to them. There is no danger in any man, if
+you can ever get him once implicated or engaged in a matter. That is the
+way we employ our strikers in all things; we have them implicated before
+we trust them from our sight.
+
+"This may seem too bold, but that is what I glory in. All the crimes I
+have ever committed have been of the most daring; and I have been
+successful in all my attempts as yet; and I am confident that I will be
+victorious in this matter, as in the robberies which I have in
+contemplation; and I will have the pleasure and honor of seeing and
+knowing that by my management I have glutted the earth with more human
+gore, and destroyed more property, than any other robber who has ever
+lived in America, or the known world. I look on the American people as
+my common enemy. My clan is strong, brave, and experienced, and rapidly
+increasing in strength every day. I should not be surprised if we were
+to be two thousand strong by the 25th of December, 1835; and, in
+addition to this, I have the advantage of any other leader of banditti
+that has ever preceded me, for at least one-half of my Grand Council are
+men of high standing, and many of them in honorable and lucrative
+offices."
+
+The number of men, more or less prominent, in the different states
+included: sixty-one from Tennessee, forty-seven from Mississippi,
+forty-six from Arkansas, twenty-five from Kentucky, twenty-seven from
+Missouri, twenty-eight from Alabama, thirty-three from Georgia,
+thirty-five from South Carolina, thirty-two from North Carolina,
+twenty-one from Virginia, twenty-seven from Maryland, sixteen from
+Florida, thirty-two from Louisiana. The transient members who made a
+habit of traveling from place to place numbered twenty-two; Murrell said
+that there was a total list of two thousand men in his band, including
+all classes.
+
+To the foregoing sketch of Murrell's life Mr. Alexander Hynds, historian
+of Tennessee, adds some facts and comments which will enable the reader
+more fully to make his own estimate as to this singular man:
+
+     "The central meeting place of Murrell's band was near an enormous
+     cottonwood tree in Mississippi county, Arkansas. It was standing in
+     1890, and is perhaps still standing in the wilderness shortly above
+     Memphis. His widely scattered bands had a system of signs and
+     passwords. Murrell himself was married to the sister of one of his
+     gang. He bought a good farm near Denmark, Madison county,
+     Tennessee, where he lived as a plain farmer, while he conducted the
+     most fearful schemes of rapine and murder from New Orleans up to
+     Memphis, St. Louis and Cincinnati.
+
+     "Nature had done much for Murrell. He had a quick mind, a fine
+     natural address and great adaptability; and he was as much at ease
+     among the refined and cultured as with his own gang. He made a
+     special study of criminal law, and knew something of medicine. He
+     often palmed himself off as a preacher, and preached in large
+     camp-meetings--and some were converted under his ministry! He often
+     used his clerical garb in passing counterfeit money. With a clear
+     head, cool, fine judgment, and a nature utterly without fear, moral
+     or physical, his power over his men never waned. To them he was
+     just, fair and amiable. He was a kind husband and brother, and a
+     faithful friend. He took great pride in his position and in the
+     operations of his gang. This conceit was the only weak spot in his
+     nature, and led to his downfall.
+
+     "Stewart, who purports to be Murrell's biographer, made Murrell's
+     acquaintance, pretended to join his gang, and playing on his
+     vanity, attended a meeting of the gang at the rendezvous at the Big
+     Cottonwood, and saw the meeting of the Grand Council. He had
+     Murrell arrested, and he was tried, convicted and sent to the
+     Tennessee penitentiary in 1834 for ten years. There he worked in
+     the blacksmith shops, but by the time he got out, was broken down
+     in mind and body, emerging an imbecile and an invalid, to live less
+     than a year.
+
+     "Stewart's account holds inconsistencies and inaccuracies, such as
+     that many men high in social and official life belonged to
+     Murrell's gang, which his published lists do not show. He had
+     perhaps 440 to 450 men, scattered from New Orleans to Cincinnati,
+     but his downfall spread fear and distrust among them.
+
+     "At Vicksburg, on July 4, 1835, a drunken member of the gang
+     threatened to attack the authorities, and was tarred and feathered.
+     Others of the gang, or at least several well-known gamblers,
+     collected and defied the citizens, and killed the good and brave
+     Dr. Bodley. Five men were hung, Hullams, Dutch Bill, North, Smith
+     and McCall. The news swept like wildfire through the Mississippi
+     Valley and gave heart to the lovers of law and order. At one or two
+     other places some were shot, some were hanged, and now and then one
+     or two were sent to prison, and thus an end was put to organized
+     crime in the Southwest forever; and this closed out the reign of
+     the river cutthroats, pirates and gamblers as well."
+
+Thus, as in the case of Sturdevant, lynch law put an effectual end to
+outlawry that the law itself could not control.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V
+
+The Vigilantes of California--_The Greatest Vigilante Movement of the
+World_--_History of the California "Stranglers" and Their Methods_.
+
+
+The world will never see another California. Great gold stampedes there
+may be, but under conditions far different from those of 1849.
+Transportation has been so developed, travel has become so swift and
+easy, that no section can now long remain segregated from the rest of
+the world. There is no corner of the earth which may not now be reached
+with a celerity impossible in the days of the great rush to the Pacific
+Coast. The whole structure of civilization, itself based upon
+transportation, goes swiftly forward with that transportation, and the
+tent of the miner or adventurer finds immediately erected by its side
+the temple of the law.
+
+It was not thus in those early days of our Western history. The law was
+left far behind by reason of the exigencies of geography and of
+wilderness travel. Thousands of honest men pressed on across the plains
+and mountains inflamed, it is true, by the madness of the lust for gold,
+but carrying at the outset no wish to escape from the watch-care of the
+law. With them went equal numbers of those eager to escape all
+restraints of society and law, men intending never to aid in the
+uprearing of the social system in new wild lands. Both these elements,
+the law-loving and the law-hating, as they advanced _pari-passu_ farther
+and farther from the staid world which they had known, noticed the
+development of a strange phenomenon: that law, which they had left
+behind them, waned in importance with each passing day. The standards of
+the old home changed, even as customs changed. A week's journey from the
+settlements showed the argonaut a new world. A month hedged it about to
+itself, alone, apart, with ideas and values of its own and independent
+of all others. A year sufficed to leave that world as distinct as though
+it occupied a planet all its own. For that world the divine fire of the
+law must be re-discovered, evolved, nay, evoked fresh from chaos even as
+the savage calls forth fire from the dry and sapless twigs of the
+wilderness.
+
+In the gold country all ideas and principles were based upon new
+conditions. Precedents did not exist. Man had gone savage again, and it
+was the beginning. Yet this savage, willing to live as a savage in a
+land which was one vast encampment, was the Anglo-Saxon savage, and
+therefore carried with him that chief trait of the American character,
+the principle that what a man earns--not what he steals, but what he
+earns--is his and his alone. This principle sowed in ground forbidding
+and unpromising was the seed of the law out of which has sprung the
+growth of a mighty civilization fit to be called an empire of its own.
+The growth and development of law under such conditions offered
+phenomena not recorded in the history of any other land or time.
+
+In the first place, and even while in transit, men organized for the
+purpose of self-protection, and in this necessary act law-abiding and
+criminal elements united. After arriving at the scenes of the gold
+fields, such organization was forgotten; even the parties that had
+banded together in the Eastern states as partners rarely kept together
+for a month after reaching the region where luck, hazard and
+opportunity, inextricably blended, appealed to each man to act for
+himself and with small reference to others. The first organizations of
+the mining camps were those of the criminal element. They were presently
+met by the organization of the law and order men. Hard upon the miners'
+law came the regularly organized legal machinery of the older states,
+modified by local conditions, and irretrievably blended with a politics
+more corrupt than any known before or since. Men were busy in picking up
+raw gold from the earth, and they paid small attention to courts and
+government. The law became an unbridled instrument of evil. Judges of
+the courts openly confiscated the property of their enemies, or
+sentenced them with no reference to the principles of justice, with as
+great disregard for life and liberty as was ever known in the
+Revolutionary days of France. Against this manner of government
+presently arose the organizations of the law-abiding, the
+justice-loving, and these took the law into their own stern hands. The
+executive officers of the law, the sheriffs and constables, were in
+league to kill and confiscate; and against these the new agency of the
+actual law made war, constituting themselves into an arm of essential
+government, and openly called themselves Vigilantes. In turn criminals
+used the cloak of the Vigilantes to cover their own deeds of lawlessness
+and violence. The Vigilantes purged themselves of the false members, and
+carried their own title of opprobrium, the "stranglers," with unconcern
+or pride. They grew in numbers, the love of justice their lodestone,
+until at one time they numbered more than five thousand in the city of
+San Francisco alone, and held that community in a grip of lawlessness,
+or law, as you shall choose to term it. They set at defiance the chief
+executive of the state, erected an armed castle of their own, seized
+upon the arms of the militia, defied the government of the United States
+and even the United States army! They were, as you shall choose to call
+them, criminals, or great and noble men. Seek as you may to-day, you
+will never know the full roster of their names, although they made no
+concealment of their identity; and no one, to this day, has ever been
+able to determine who took the first step in their organization. They
+began their labors in California at a time when there had been more than
+two thousand murders--five hundred in one year--and not five legal
+executions. Their task included the erection of a fit structure of the
+law, and, incidentally, the destruction of a corrupt and unworthy
+structure claiming the title of the law. In this strange, swift panorama
+there is all the story of the social system, all the picture of the
+building of that temple of the law which, as Americans, we now revere,
+or, at times, still despise and desecrate.
+
+At first the average gold seeker concerned himself little with law,
+because he intended to make his fortune quickly and then hasten back
+East to his former home; yet, as early as the winter of 1849, there was
+elected a legislature which met at San Jos�, a Senate of sixteen members
+and an Assembly of thirty-six. In this election the new American vote
+was in evidence. The miners had already tired of the semi-military phase
+of their government, and had met and adopted a state constitution. The
+legislature enacted one hundred and forty new laws in two months, and
+abolished all former laws; and then, satisfied with its labors, it left
+the enforcement of the laws, in the good old American fashion, to
+whomsoever might take an interest in the matter.[D] This is our custom
+even to-day. Our great cities of the East are practically all governed,
+so far as they are governed at all, by civic leagues, civic federations,
+citizens' leagues, business men's associations--all protests at
+non-enforcement of the law. This protest in '49 and on the Pacific coast
+took a sterner form.
+
+[Footnote D: Tuthill: "History of California."]
+
+At one time the city of San Francisco had three separate and distinct
+city councils, each claiming to be the only legal one. In spite of the
+new state organization, the law was much a matter of go as you please.
+Under such conditions it was no wonder that outlawry began to show its
+head in bold and well-organized forms. A party of ruffians, who called
+themselves the "Hounds," banded together to run all foreigners out of
+the rich camps, and to take their diggings over for themselves. A number
+of Chileans were beaten or shot, and their property was confiscated or
+destroyed. This was not in accordance with the saving grace of American
+justice, which devoted to a man that which he had earned. A counter
+organization was promptly formed, and the "Hounds" found themselves
+confronted with two hundred "special constables," each with a good
+rifle. A mass meeting sat as a court, and twenty of the "Hounds" were
+tried, ten of them receiving sentences that never were enforced, but
+which had the desired effect. So now, while far to the eastward the
+Congress was hotly arguing the question of the admission of California
+as a state, she was beginning to show an interest in law and justice
+when aroused thereto.
+
+It was difficult material out of which to build a civilized community.
+The hardest population of the entire world was there; men savage or
+civilized by tradition, heathen or Christian once at least, but now all
+Californian. Wealth was the one common thing. The average daily return
+in the work of mining ranged from twenty to thirty dollars, and no man
+might tell when his fortune might be made by a blow of a pick. Some
+nuggets of gold weighing twenty-five pounds were discovered. In certain
+diggings men picked pure gold from the rock crevices with a spoon or a
+knife point. As to values, they were guessed at, the only currency being
+gold dust or nuggets. Prodigality was universal. All the gamblers of the
+world met in vulture concourse. There was little in the way of home; of
+women almost none. Life was as cheap as gold dust. Let those who liked
+bother about statehood and government and politics; the average man was
+too busy digging and spending gold to trouble over such matters. The
+most shameless men were those found in public office. Wealth and
+commerce waxed great, but law and civilization languished. The times
+were ripening for the growth of some system of law which would offer
+proper protection to life and property. The measure of this need may be
+seen from the figures of the production of gold. From 1848 to 1856
+California produced between five hundred and six hundred million dollars
+in virgin gold. What wonder the courts were weak; and what wonder the
+Vigilantes became strong!
+
+There were in California three distinct Vigilante movements, those of
+1849, 1851, and 1856, the earliest applying rather to the outlying
+mining camps than to the city of San Francisco. In 1851, seeing that the
+courts made no attempt to punish criminals, a committee was formed which
+did much toward enforcing respect for the principles of justice, if not
+of law. On June 11 they hanged John Jenkins for robbing a store. A month
+later they hanged James Stuart for murdering a sheriff. In August of the
+same summer they took out of jail and hanged Whittaker and McKenzie,
+Australian ex-convicts, whom they had tried and sentenced, but who had
+been rescued by the officers of the law. Two weeks later this committee
+disbanded. They paid no attention to the many killings that were going
+on over land titles and the like, but confined themselves to punishing
+men who had committed intolerable crimes. Theft was as serious as
+murder, perhaps more so, in the creed of the time and place. The list of
+murders reached appalling dimensions. The times were sadly out of joint.
+The legislature was corrupt, graft was rampant--though then unknown by
+that name--and the entire social body was restless, discontented, and
+uneasy. Politics had become a fine art. The judiciary, lazy and corrupt,
+was held in contempt. The dockets of the courts were full, and little
+was done to clear them effectively. Criminals did as they liked and went
+unwhipped of justice. It was truly a day of violence and license.
+
+Once more the sober and law-loving men of California sent abroad word,
+and again the Vigilantes assembled. In 1853 they hanged two Mexicans for
+horse stealing, and also a bartender who had shot a citizen near Shasta.
+At Jackson they hanged another Mexican for horse stealing, and at
+Volcano, in 1854, they hanged a man named Macy for stabbing an old and
+helpless man. In this instance vengeance was very swift, for the
+murderer was executed within half an hour after his deed. The haste
+caused certain criticism when, in the same month one Johnson was hanged
+for stabbing a man named Montgomery, at Iowa Hill, who later recovered.
+At Los Angeles three men were sentenced to death by the local court, but
+the Supreme Court issued a stay for two of them, Brown and Lee. The
+people asserted that all must die together, and the mayor of the city
+was of the same mind. The third man, Alvitre, was hanged legally on
+January 12, 1855. On that day the mayor resigned his office to join the
+Vigilantes. Brown was taken out of jail and hanged in spite of the
+decision of the Supreme Court. The people were out-running the law. That
+same month they hanged another murderer for killing the treasurer of
+Tuolumne county. In the following month they hanged three more cattle
+thieves in Contra Costa county, and followed this by hanging a horse
+thief in Oakland. A larger affair threatened in the following summer,
+when thirty-six Mexicans were arrested for killing a party of Americans.
+For a time it was proposed to hang all thirty-six, but sober counsel
+prevailed and only three were hanged; this after formal jury trial.
+Unknown bandits waylaid and killed Isaac B. Wall and T. S. Williamson of
+Monterey, and, that same month U. S. Marshal William H. Richardson was
+shot by Charles Cora in the streets of San Francisco. The people
+grumbled. There was no certainty that justice would ever reach these
+offenders. The reputation of the state was ruined, not by the acts of
+the Vigilantes, but by those of unscrupulous and unprincipled men in
+office and upon the bench. The government was run by gamblers, ruffians,
+and thugs. The good men of the state began to prepare for a general
+movement of purification and the installation of an actual law. The
+great Vigilante movement of 1856 was the result.
+
+The immediate cause of this last organization was the murder of James
+King, editor of the _Bulletin_, by James P. Casey. Casey, after shooting
+King, was hurried off to jail by his own friends, and there was
+protected by a display of military force. King lingered for six days
+after he was shot, and the state of public opinion was ominous. Cora,
+who had killed Marshal Richardson, had never been punished, and there
+seemed no likelihood that Casey would be. The local press was divided.
+The religious papers, the _Pacific_ and the _Christian Advocate_, both
+openly declared that Casey ought to be hanged. The clergy took up the
+matter sternly, and one minister of the Gospel, Rev. J. A. Benton, of
+Sacramento, gave utterance to this remarkable but well-grounded
+statement: "_A people can be justified in recalling delegated power and
+resuming its exercise._" Before we hasten to criticize sweepingly under
+the term "mob law" such work as this of the Vigilantes, it will be well
+for us to weigh that utterance, and to apply it to conditions of our own
+times; to-day is well-nigh as dangerous to American liberties as were
+the wilder days of California.
+
+Now, summoned by some unknown command, armed men appeared in the streets
+of San Francisco, twenty-four companies in all, with perhaps fifty men
+in each company. The Vigilantes had organized again. They brought a
+cannon and placed it against the jail gate, and demanded that Casey be
+surrendered to them. There was no help for it, and Casey went away
+handcuffed, to face a court where political influence would mean
+nothing. An hour later the murderer Cora was taken from his cell, and
+was hastened away to join Casey in the headquarters building of the
+Vigilantes. A company of armed and silent men marched on each side of
+the carriage containing the prisoner. The two men were tried in formal
+session of the Committee, each having counsel, and all evidence being
+carefully weighed.
+
+King died on May 20, 1856, and on May 22d was buried with popular
+honors, a long procession of citizens following the body to the
+cemetery. A popular subscription was started, and in a brief time over
+thirty thousand dollars was raised for the benefit of his widow and
+children. When the long procession filed back into the city, it was to
+witness, swinging from a beam projecting from a window of Committee
+headquarters, the bodies of Casey and Cora.
+
+The Committee now arrested two more men, not for a capital crime, but
+for one which lay back of a long series of capital crimes--the stuffing
+of ballot-boxes and other election frauds. These men were Billy Mulligan
+and the prize-fighter known as Yankee Sullivan. Although advised that he
+would have a fair trial and that the death penalty would not be passed
+upon him, Yankee Sullivan committed suicide in his cell. The entire
+party of lawyers and judges were arrayed against the Committee,
+naturally enough. Judge Terry, of the Supreme Court, issued a writ of
+_habeas corpus_ for Mulligan. The Committee ignored the sheriff who was
+sent to serve the writ. They cleared the streets in front of
+headquarters, established six cannon in front of their rooms, put loaded
+swivels on top of the roof and mounted a guard of a hundred riflemen.
+They brought bedding and provisions to their quarters, mounted a huge
+triangle on the roof for a signal to their men all over the city,
+arranged the interior of their rooms in the form of a court and, in
+short, set themselves up as the law, openly defying their own Supreme
+Court of the state. So far from being afraid of the vengeance of the
+law, they arrested two more men for election frauds, Chas. P. Duane and
+"Woolly" Kearney. All their prisoners were guarded in cells within the
+headquarters building.
+
+The opposition to the Committee now organized in turn under the name of
+the "Law and Order Men," and held a public meeting. This was numerously
+attended by members of the Vigilante Committee, whose books were now
+open for enrollment. Not even the criticism of their own friends stayed
+these men in their resolution. They went even further. Governor Johnson
+issued a proclamation to them to disband and disperse. They paid no more
+attention to this than they had to Judge Terry's writ of _habeas
+corpus_. The governor threatened them with the militia, but it was not
+enough to frighten them. General Sherman resigned his command in the
+state militia, and counseled moderation at so dangerous a time. Many of
+the militia turned in their rifles to the Committee, which got other
+arms from vessels in the harbor, and from carelessly guarded armories.
+Halting at no responsibility, a band of the Committee even boarded a
+schooner which was carrying down a cargo of rifles from the governor to
+General Howard at San Francisco, and seized the entire lot. Shortly
+after this they confiscated a second shipment which the governor was
+sending down from Sacramento in the same way; thus seizing property of
+the federal government. If there was such a crime as high treason, they
+committed it, and did so openly and without hesitation. Governor
+Johnson contented himself with drawing up a statement of the situation,
+which was sent down to President Pierce at Washington, with the request
+that he instruct naval officers on the Pacific station to supply arms to
+the State of California, which had been despoiled by certain of its
+citizens. President Pierce turned over the matter to his
+attorney-general, Caleb Cushing, who rendered an opinion saying that
+Governor Johnson had not yet exhausted the state remedies, and that the
+United States government could not interfere.
+
+Little remained for the Committee to do to show its resolution to act as
+the State _pro tempore_. That little it now proceeded to do by
+practically suspending the Supreme Court of California. In making an
+arrest of a witness wanted by the Committee, Sterling A. Hopkins, one of
+the policemen retained for work by the Committee, was stabbed in the
+throat by Judge Terry, of the Supreme Bench, who was very bitter against
+all members of the Committee. It was supposed that the wound would prove
+fatal, and at once the Committee sounded the call for general assembly.
+The city went into two hostile camps, Terry and his friend, Dr. Ashe,
+taking refuge in the armory where the "Law and Order" faction kept
+their arms. The members of the Vigilante Committee besieged this place,
+and presently took charge of Terry and Ashe, as prisoners. Then the
+scouts of the Committee went out after the arms of all the armories
+belonging to the governor and the "Law and Order" men who supported him,
+the lawyers and politicians who felt that their functions were being
+usurped. Two thousand rifles were taken, and the opposing party was left
+without arms. The entire state, so to speak, was now in the hands of the
+"Committee of Vigilance," a body of men, quiet, law-loving,
+law-enforcing, but of course technically traitors and criminals. The
+parallel of this situation has never existed elsewhere in American
+history.
+
+Had Hopkins died the probability is that Judge Terry would have been
+hanged by the Committee, but fortunately he did not die. Terry lay a
+prisoner in the cell assigned him at the Committee's rooms for seven
+weeks, by which time Hopkins had recovered from the wound given him by
+Terry. The case became one of national interest, and tirades against
+"the Stranglers" were not lacking; but the Committee went on enrolling
+men. And it did not open its doors for its prisoners, although appeal
+was made to Congress in Terry's behalf--an appeal which was referred to
+the Committee on Judiciary, and so buried.
+
+Terry was finally released, much to the regret of many of the Committee,
+who thought he should have been punished. The executive committee called
+together the board of delegates, and issued a statement showing that
+death and banishment were the only penalties optional with them. Death
+they could not inflict, because Hopkins had recovered; and banishment
+they thought impractical at that time, as it might prolong discussion
+indefinitely, and enforce a longer term in service than the Committee
+cared for. It was the earnest wish of all to disband at the first moment
+that they considered their state and city fit to take care of
+themselves, and the sacredness of the ballot-box again insured. To
+assure this latter fact, they had arrayed themselves against the federal
+government, as certainly they had against the state government.
+
+The Committee now hanged two more murderers--Hetherington and Brace--the
+former a gambler from St. Louis, the latter a youth of New York
+parentage, twenty-one years of age, but hardened enough to curse
+volubly upon the scaffold. By the middle of August, 1856, they had no
+more prisoners in charge, and were ready to turn the city over to its
+own system of government. Their report, published in the following fall,
+showed they had hanged four men and banished many others, besides
+frightening out of the country a large criminal population that did not
+tarry for arrest and trial.
+
+If opinion was divided to some extent in San Francisco, where those
+stirring deeds occurred, the sentiment of the outlying communities of
+California was almost a unit in favor of the Vigilantes, and their
+action received the sincere flattery of imitation, as half a score of
+criminals learned to their sorrow on impromptu scaffolds. There was no
+large general organization in any other community, however. After a time
+some of the banished men came back, and many damage suits were argued
+later in the courts; but small satisfaction came to those claimants, and
+few men who knew of the deeds of the "Committee of Vigilance" ever cared
+to discuss them. Indeed it was practically certain that any man who ever
+served on a Western vigilance committee finished his life with sealed
+lips. Had he ventured to talk of what he knew he would have met
+contempt or something harsher.
+
+A political capital was made out of the situation in San Francisco. The
+"Committee of Vigilance" felt that it had now concluded its work and was
+ready to go back to civil life. On August 18, 1856, the Committee
+marched openly in review through the streets of the city, five thousand
+one hundred and thirty-seven men in line, with three companies of
+artillery, eighteen cannon, a company of dragoons, and a medical staff
+of forty odd physicians. There were in this body one hundred and fifty
+men who had served in the old Committee in 1851. After the parade the
+men halted, the assemblage broke up into companies, the companies into
+groups; and thus, quietly, with no vaunting of themselves and no
+concealment of their acts, there passed away one of the most singular
+and significant organizations of American citizens ever known. They did
+this with the quiet assertion that if their services were again needed,
+they would again assemble; and they printed a statement covering their
+actions in detail, showing to any fair-minded man that what they had
+done was indeed for the good of the whole community, which had been
+wronged by those whom it had elected to power, those who had set
+themselves up as masters where they had been chosen as servants.
+
+The "Committee of Vigilance" of San Francisco was made up of men from
+all walks of life and all political parties. It had any amount of money
+at its command that it required, for its members were of the best and
+most influential citizens. It maintained, during its existence, quarters
+unique in their way, serving as arms-room, trial court, fortress, and
+prison. It was not a mob, but a grave and orderly band of men, and its
+deliberations were formal and exact, its labors being divided among
+proper sub-committees and boards. The quarters were kept open day and
+night, always ready for swift action, if necessary. It had an executive
+committee, which upon occasion conferred with a board of delegates
+composed of three men from each subdivision of the general body. The
+executive committee consisted of thirty-three members, and its decision
+was final; but it could not enforce a death penalty except on a
+two-thirds vote of those present. It had a prosecuting attorney, and it
+tried no prisoner without assigning to him competent counsel. It had
+also a police force, with a chief of police and a sheriff with several
+deputies. In short, it took over the government, and was indeed the
+government, municipal and state in one. Recent as was its life, its
+deeds to-day are well-nigh forgotten. Though opinion may be still
+divided in certain quarters, California need not be ashamed of this
+"Committee of Vigilance." She should be proud of it, for it was largely
+through its unthanked and dangerous safeguarding of the public interests
+that California gained her social system of to-day.
+
+In all the history of American desperadoism and of the movements which
+have checked it, there is no page more worth study than this from the
+story of the great Golden State. The moral is a sane, clean, and strong
+one. The creed of the "Committee of Vigilance" is one which we might
+well learn to-day; and its practice would leave us with more dignity of
+character than we can claim, so long as we content ourselves merely with
+outcry and criticism, with sweeping accusation of our unfaithful public
+servants, and without seeing that they are punished. There is nothing
+but manhood and freedom and justice in the covenant of the Committee.
+That covenant all American citizens should be ready to sign and live up
+to: "We do bind ourselves each unto the other by a solemn oath to do and
+perform every just and lawful act for the maintenance of law and order,
+_and to sustain the laws when faithfully and properly administered_. But
+we are determined that no thief, burglar, incendiary, assassin,
+_ballot-box stuffer or other disturber of the peace_, shall escape
+punishment, either by quibbles of the law, the carelessness of the
+police or a laxity of those who pretend to administer justice."
+
+What a man earns, that is his--such was the lesson of California.
+Self-government is our right as a people--that is what the Vigilantes
+said. When the laws failed of execution, then it was the people's right
+to resume the power that they had delegated, or which had been usurped
+from them--that is their statement as quoted by one of the ablest of
+many historians of this movement. The people might withdraw authority
+when faithless servants used it to thwart justice--that was what the
+Vigilantes preached. It is good doctrine to-day.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VI
+
+The Outlaw of the Mountains--_The Gold Stampedes of the '60's_--_Armed
+Bandits of the Mountain Mining Camps_.
+
+
+The greatest of American gold stampedes, and perhaps the greatest of the
+world, not even excepting that of Australia, was that following upon the
+discovery of gold in California. For twenty years all the West was mad
+for gold. No other way would serve but the digging of wealth directly
+from the soil. Agriculture was too slow, commerce too tame, to satisfy
+the bold population of the frontier. The history of the first struggle
+for mining claims in California--one stampede after another, as this,
+that and the other "strike" was reported in new localities--was repeated
+all over the vast region of the auriferous mountain lands lying between
+the plains and California, which were swiftly prospected by men who had
+now learned well the prospector's trade. The gold-hunters lapped back on
+their own trails, and, no longer content with California, began to
+prospect lower Oregon, upper Idaho, and Western Montana. Walla Walla was
+a supply point for a time. Florence was a great mountain market, and
+Lewiston. One district after another sprang into prominence, to fade
+away after a year or two of feverish life. The placers near Bannack
+caught a wild set of men, who surged back from California. Oro Fino was
+a temporary capital; then the fabulously rich placer which made Alder
+Gulch one of the quickly perished but still unforgotten diggings.
+
+The flat valley of this latter gulch housed several "towns," but was
+really for a dozen miles a continuous string of miners' cabins. The city
+of Helena is built on the tailings of these placer washings, and its
+streets are literally paved with gold even to-day. Here in 1863, while
+the great conflict between North and South was raging, a great community
+of wild men, not organized into anything fit to be called society,
+divided and fought bitterly for control of the apparently exhaustless
+wealth which came pouring from the virgin mines. These clashing
+factions repeated, in intensified form, the history of California. They
+were even more utterly cut off from all the world. Letters and papers
+from the states had to reach the mountains by way of California, via the
+Horn or the Isthmus. Touch with the older civilization was utterly lost;
+of law there was none.
+
+Upon the social horizon now appeared the sinister figure of the trained
+desperado, the professional bad man. The business of outlawry was turned
+into a profession, one highly organized, relatively safe and extremely
+lucrative. There was wealth to be had for the asking or the taking. Each
+miner had his buckskin purse filled with native gold. This dust was like
+all other dust. It could not be traced nor identified; and the old
+saying, "'Twas mine, 'tis his," might here of all places in the world
+most easily become true. Checks, drafts, currency as we know it now, all
+the means by which civilized men keep record of their property
+transactions, were unknown. The gold-scales established the only
+currency, and each man was his own banker, obliged to be his own peace
+officer, and the defender of his own property.
+
+Now our desperado appeared, the man who had killed his man, or, more
+likely, several men, and who had not been held sternly to an accounting
+for his acts; the man with the six-shooter and the skill to use it more
+swiftly and accurately than the average man; the man with the mind which
+did not scruple at murder. He found much to encourage him, little to
+oppose him. "The crowd from both East and West had now arrived. The town
+was full of gold-hunters. Expectation lighted up the countenance of
+every new-comer. Few had yet realized the utter despair of failure in a
+mining camp. In the presence of vice in all its forms, men who were
+staid and exemplary at home laid aside their morality like a useless
+garment, and yielded to the seductive influences spread for their ruin.
+The gambling-shops and hurdy-gurdy saloons--beheld for the first time by
+many of these fortune-seekers--lured them on step by step, until many of
+them abandoned all thought of the object they had in pursuit for lives
+of shameful and criminal indulgence. The condition of society thus
+produced was fatal to all attempts at organization, either for
+protection or good order."
+
+Yet the same condition made opportunity for those who did not wish to
+see a society established. Wherever the law-abiding did not organize,
+the bandits did; and the strength of their party, the breadth and
+boldness of its operations, and the length of time it carried on its
+unmolested operations, form one of the most extraordinary incidents in
+American history. They killed, robbed, and terrorized over hundreds of
+miles of mountain country, for years setting at defiance all attempts at
+their restraint. They recognized no command except that of their
+"chief," whose title was always open to contest, and who gained his own
+position only by being more skilful, more bloodthirsty, and more
+unscrupulous than his fellows.
+
+Henry Plummer, the most important captain of these cutthroats of the
+mountains, had a hundred or more men in his widely scattered criminal
+confederacy. More than one hundred murders were committed by these
+banditti in the space of three years. Many others were, without doubt,
+committed and never traced. Dead bodies were common in those hills, and
+often were unidentified. The wanderer from the States usually kept his
+own counsel. None knew who his family might be; and that family,
+missing a member who disappeared into the maw of the great West of that
+day of danger, might never know the fate of the one mysteriously
+vanished.
+
+These robbers had their confederates scattered in all ranks of life.
+Plummer himself was sheriff of his county, and had confederates in
+deputies or city marshals. This was a strange feature of this old
+desperadoism in the West--it paraded often in the guise of the law. We
+shall find further instances of this same phenomenon. Employ�s, friends,
+officials--there was none that one might trust. The organization of the
+robbers even extended to the stage lines, and a regular system of
+communication existed by which the allies advised each other when and
+where such and such a passenger was going, with such and such an amount
+of gold upon him. The holding up of the stage was something regularly
+expected, and the traveler who had any money or valuables drew a long
+breath when he reached a region where there was really a protecting law.
+Men were shot down in the streets on little or no provocation, and the
+murderer boasted of his crime and defied punishment. The dance-halls
+were run day and night. The drinking of whiskey, and, moreover, bad
+whiskey, was a thing universal. Vice was everywhere and virtue was not.
+Those few who had an aim and an ambition in life were long in the
+minority and, in the welter of a general license, they might not
+recognize each other and join hands. Murder and pillage ruled, until at
+length the spirit of law and order, born anew of necessity, grew and
+gained power as it did in most early communities of the West. How these
+things in time took place may best be seen by reference to the bloody
+biographies of some of the most reckless desperadoes ever seen in any
+land.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VII
+
+Henry Plummer--_A Northern Bad Man_--_The Head of the Robber Band in the
+Montana Mining Country_--_A Man of Brains and Ability, but a
+Cold-Blooded Murderer_.
+
+
+Henry Plummer was for several years in the early '60's the "chief" of
+the widely extended band of robbers and murderers who kept the
+placer-mining fields of Montana and Idaho in a state of terror. Posing
+part of the time as an officer of the law, he was all the time the
+leader in the reign of lawlessness. He was always ready for combat, and
+he so relied upon his own skill that he would even give his antagonist
+the advantage--or just enough advantage to leave himself sure to kill
+him. His victims in duels of this sort were many, and, as to his victims
+in cold-blooded robbery, in which death wiped out the record, no one
+will ever know the list.
+
+Plummer was born in Connecticut in 1837, and, until his departure as a
+young man for the West, he was all that might be expected of one brought
+up under the chastening influences of a New England home. He received a
+good education, and became a polished, affable, and gentlemanly
+appearing man. He was about five feet ten, possibly five feet eleven
+inches in height, and weighed about one hundred and sixty pounds, being
+rather slender in appearance. His face was handsome and his demeanor
+always frank and open, although he was quiet and did not often talk
+unless accosted. His voice was low and pleasant, and he had no bravado
+or swagger about him. His eye was light in color and singularly devoid
+of expression. Two features gave him a sinister look--his forehead,
+which was low and brutish, and his eye, which was cold and fish-like.
+His was a strong, well-keyed nervous organization. He was quick as a cat
+when in action, though apparently suave and easy in disposition. He was
+a good pistol shot, perhaps the best of all the desperadoes who infested
+Idaho and Montana at that time. Not even in his cups did he lose control
+of voice and eye and weapon. He was always ready--a cool, quiet,
+self-possessed, well-regulated killing machine.
+
+At the date of Plummer's arrival in the mining country, the town of
+Lewiston, Idaho, was the emporium of a wide region then embraced under
+the name of Idaho Territory; the latter also including Montana at that
+time. Where his life had been spent previous to that is not known, but
+it is thought that he came over from California. Plummer set up as a
+gambler, and this gave him the key to the brotherhood of the bad.
+Gamblers usually stick together pretty closely, and institute a sort of
+free-masonry of their own; so that Plummer was not long in finding,
+among men of his own profession and their associates, a number of others
+whom he considered safe to take into his confidence. Every man accepted
+by Plummer was a murderer. He would have no weaklings. No one can tell
+how many victims his associates had had before they went into his
+alliance; but it is sure that novices in man-killing were not desired,
+nor any who had not been proved of nerve. Plummer soon had so many men
+that he set up a rendezvous at points on all the trails leading out from
+Lewiston to such mines as were producing any gold. One robbery followed
+another, until the band threw off all restraint and ran the towns as
+they liked, paying for what they took when they felt like it, and
+laughing at the protests of the minority of the population, which was
+placed in the hard strait of being in that country and unable to get out
+without being robbed. It was the intention to seize the property of
+every man who was there and who was not accepted as a member of the
+gang.
+
+One killing after another occurred on the trails, and man after man was
+lost and never traced. Assaults were made upon many men who escaped, but
+no criminal could be located, and, indeed, there was no law by which any
+of them could be brought to book. The express riders were fired upon and
+robbed and the pack trains looted. No man expected to cross the mountain
+trails without meeting some of the robbers, and, when he did meet them,
+he expected to be killed if he made resistance, for they outnumbered the
+parties they attacked in nearly all instances. The outlaws were now
+indeed about three times as numerous as those not in sympathy with them.
+
+Rendered desperate by this state of affairs, a few resolute citizens who
+wanted law and order found each other out at last and organized into a
+vigilance committee, remembering the success of the Vigilantes of
+California, whose work was still recent history. Plummer himself was
+among the first to join this embryonic vigilante movement, as was the
+case in so many other similar movements in other parts of the West,
+where the criminal joined the law-loving in order to find out what the
+latter intended to do. His address was such as to disarm completely all
+suspicion, and he had full knowledge of facts which enabled him to
+murder for vengeance as well as for gain.
+
+After Oro Fino was worked out as a placer field, the prospectors located
+other grounds east of the Salmon River range, at Elk City and Florence,
+and soon Lewiston was forsaken, all the population trooping off over the
+mountains to the new fields. This broke up the vigilante movement in its
+infancy, and gave Plummer a longer lease of life for his plans. All
+those who had joined the vigilante movement were marked men. One after
+another they were murdered, none knew by whom, or why. Masked robbers
+were seen every day along the trails leading between one remote mining
+camp and another, but no one suspected Henry Plummer, who was serving
+well in his double r�le.
+
+Meantime, additional placer grounds had been discovered a hundred and
+fifty miles south of Florence, on the Boise river, and some valuable
+strikes were also made far to the north, at the upper waters of the
+Beaverhead. All the towns to the westward were now abandoned, and the
+miners left Florence as madly as they had rushed to it from Oro Fino and
+Elk City. West Bannack and East Bannack were now all the cry. To these
+new points, as may be supposed, the organized band of robbers fled with
+the others. Plummer, who had tried Elk City, Deer Lodge, and other
+points, now appeared at Bannack.
+
+One after another reports continued to come of placers discovered here
+and there in the upper Rockies. Among all these, the strikes on Gold
+Creek proved to be the most extensive and valuable. A few Eastern men,
+almost by accident, had found fair "pay" there, and returned to that
+locality when they found themselves unable to get across the
+snow-covered mountains to Florence. These few men at the Gold Creek
+diggings got large additions from expeditions made up in Denver and
+bound for Florence, who also were unable to get across the Salmon River
+mountains. Yet others came out in the summer of 1862, by way of the
+upper plains and the Missouri river, so that the accident of the season,
+so to speak, turned aside the traffic intended to reach Florence into
+quite another region. This fact, as events proved, had much to do with
+the later fate of Henry Plummer and his associates.
+
+These Eastern men were different from those who had been schooled in the
+mines of the Pacific Slope. They still clung to law and order; and they
+did not propose to be robbed. The first news of the strikes brought over
+the advance guard of the roughs who had been running the other camps;
+and, as soon as these were unmasked by acts of their own, the little
+advance guard of civilization shot one of them, Arnett, and hung two
+others, Jernigan and Spillman. This was the real beginning of a
+permanent vigilante force in Montana. It afforded perhaps the only known
+instance of a man being buried with a six-shooter in one hand and a hand
+of cards in the other. Arnett was killed in a game of cards, and died
+with his death grip thus fixed.
+
+The new diggings did not at first prove themselves, and the camp at
+Bannack, on Grasshopper Creek, was more prosperous. Henry Plummer,
+therefore, elected Bannack as his headquarters. Others of the loosely
+connected banditti began to drop into Bannack from other districts, and
+Plummer was soon surrounded by his clan and kin in crime. George Ives,
+Bill Mitchell, Charlie Reeves, Cy Skinner, and others began operations
+on the same lines which had so distinguished them at the earlier
+diggings, west of the range. In a few weeks Bannack was as bad as
+Lewiston or Florence had ever been. In fact, it became so bad that the
+Vigilantes began to show their teeth, although they confined their
+sentences to banishment. The black sheep and the white began now to be
+segregated.
+
+Plummer, shrewd to see the drift of opinion, saw that he must now play
+his hand out to the finish, that he could not now reform. He accordingly
+laid his plans to kill Jack Crawford, who was chosen as miners' sheriff.
+Plummer undertook one expedient after another to draw Crawford into a
+quarrel, in which he knew he could kill him; for Plummer's speed with
+the pistol had been proved when he killed Jack Cleveland, one of his own
+best gun-fighters. Rumor ran that he was the best pistol shot in the
+Rockies and as bad a man as the worst. Plummer thought that Crawford
+suspected him of belonging to the bandits, and so doomed him. Crawford
+was wary, and defeated three separate attempts to waylay and kill him,
+besides avoiding several quarrels that were thrust upon him by Plummer
+or his men. Dick Phleger, a friend of Crawford, was also marked by
+Plummer, who challenged him to fight with pistols, as he frequently had
+challenged Crawford. Phleger was a braver man than Crawford, but he
+declined the duel. Plummer would have killed them both. He only wanted
+the appearance of an "even break," with the later plea of
+"self-defence," which has shielded so many bad men from punishment for
+murder.
+
+Plummer now tried treachery, and told Crawford they would be friends.
+All the time he was hunting a chance to kill him. At length he held
+Crawford up in a restaurant, and stood waiting for him with a rifle. A
+friend handed Crawford a rifle, and the latter slipped up and took a
+shot from the corner of the house at Plummer, who was across the street.
+The ball struck Plummer's right arm and tore it to pieces. Crawford
+missed him with a second shot, and Plummer walked back to his own
+cabin. Here he had a long siege with his wound, refusing to allow his
+arm to be amputated, since he knew he might as well be dead as so
+crippled. He finally recovered, although the ball was never removed and
+the bone never knit. The ball lodged in his wrist and was found there
+after his death, worn smooth as silver by the action of the bones.
+Crawford escaped down the Missouri river, to which he fled at Fort
+Benton. He never came back to the country. Plummer went on practising
+with the six-shooter with his left hand, and became a very good
+left-hand shot. He knew that his only safety lay in his skill with
+weapons.
+
+Plummer's physician was Dr. Glick, who operated under cover of a
+shotgun, and with the cheerful assurance that if he killed Plummer by
+accident, he himself would be killed. After that Glick dressed the
+wounds of more than one outlaw, but dared not tell of it. Plummer
+admitted to him at last that these were his men and told Glick he would
+kill him if he ever breathed a word of this confidence. So the knowledge
+of the existence of the banditti was known to one man for a long time.
+
+As to Bannack, it was one of the wildest camps ever known in any land.
+Pistol fire was heard incessantly, and one victim after another was
+added to the list. George Ives, Johnny Cooper, George Carrhart, Hayes
+Lyons, Cy Skinner, and others of the toughs were now open associates of
+the leading spirit, Plummer. The condition of lawlessness and terror was
+such that all the decent men would have gone back to the States, but the
+same difficulties that had kept them from getting across to Florence now
+kept them from getting back East. The winter held them prisoners.
+
+Henry Plummer was now elected sheriff for the Bannack mining district,
+to succeed Crawford, whom he had run out of the country. It seems very
+difficult to understand how this could have occurred; but it will serve
+to show the numerical strength of Plummer's party. The latter, now
+married, professed to have reformed. In reality, he was deeper in
+deviltry than ever in his life.
+
+The diggings at Gold Creek and Bannack were now eclipsed by the
+sensational discoveries on the famous Alder Gulch, one of the phenomenal
+placers of the world, and the most productive ever known in America. The
+stampede was fast and furious to these new diggings. In ten days the
+gulch was staked out for twelve miles, and the cabins of the miners
+were occupied for all of that distance, and scattered over a long, low
+flat, whose vegetation was quickly swept away. The new camp that sprung
+up on one end of this bar was called Virginia City. It need not be said
+that among the first settlers there were the outlaws earlier mentioned,
+with several others: Jack Gallagher, Buck Stinson, Ned Ray, and others,
+these three named being "deputies" of "Sheriff" Plummer. A sort of court
+was formed for trying disputed mining claims. Charley Forbes was clerk
+of this court, and incidentally one of Plummer's band! This clerk and
+these deputies killed one Dillingham, whom they suspected of informing a
+friend of a robbery planned to make away with him on the trail from
+Bannack to Virginia City. They were "tried" by the court and freed.
+Hayes Lyons admitted privately that Plummer had told him to kill the
+informer Dillingham. The invariable plan of this bloodthirsty man was to
+destroy unfavorable testimony by means of death.
+
+The unceasing flood of gold from the seemingly exhaustless gulch caused
+three or four more little camps or towns to spring up; but Virginia City
+now took the palm for frontier reputation in hardness. Ten millions in
+"dust" was washed out in one year. Every one had gold, sacks and cans of
+it. The wild license of the place was unspeakably vitiating. Fights with
+weapons were incessant. Rude dance halls and saloons were crowded with
+truculent, armed men in search of trouble. Churches and schools were
+unknown. Tents, log cabins, and brush shanties made the residences.
+"Hacks rattled to and fro between the several towns, freighted with
+drunken and rowdy humanity of both sexes. Citizens of acknowledged
+respectability often walked, more often perhaps rode side by side on
+horseback, with noted courtesans, in open day, through the crowded
+streets, and seemingly suffered no harm in reputation. Pistols flashed,
+bowie-knives flourished, oaths filled the air. This was indeed the reign
+of unbridled license, and men who at first regarded it with disgust and
+terror, by constant exposure soon learned to become part of it, and to
+forget that they had ever been aught else. Judges, lawyers, doctors,
+even clergymen, could not claim exemption."
+
+This was in 1863. At that time, the nearest capitals were Olympia, on
+Puget Sound; Yankton, two thousand miles away; and Lewiston, seven
+hundred miles away. What machinery of the law was there to hinder
+Plummer and his men? What better field than this one, literally
+overflowing with gold, could they have asked for their operations? And
+what better chief than Plummer?
+
+His next effort was to be appointed deputy United States marshal, and he
+received the indorsement of the leading men of Bannack. Plummer
+afterward tried several times to kill Nathaniel P. Langford, who caused
+his defeat, but was unsuccessful in getting the opportunity he sought.
+
+From Bannack to Salt Lake City was about five hundred miles. Mails by
+this time came in from Salt Lake City, which was the supply point. If a
+man wanted to send out gold to his people in the States, it had to go
+over this long trail across the wild regions. There was no mail service,
+and no express office nearer than Salt Lake. Merchants sent out their
+funds by private messenger. Every such journey was a risk of death.
+Plummer had clerks in every institution that was making money, and these
+kept him posted as to the times when shipments of dust were about to be
+made; they also told him when any well-staked miner was going out to
+the States. Plummer's men were posted all along these mountain trails.
+No one will ever know how many men were killed in all on the Salt Lake
+trail.
+
+There was a stage also between Bannack and Virginia City, and this was
+regarded as a legitimate and regular booty producer by the gang.
+Whenever a rich passenger took stage, a confederate at the place put a
+mark on the vehicle so that it could be read at the next stop. At this
+point there was sure to be others of the gang, who attended to further
+details. Sometimes two or three thousand dollars would be taken from a
+single passenger. A stage often carried fifteen or twenty thousand
+dollars in dust. Plummer knew when and where and how each stage was
+robbed, but in his capacity as sheriff covered up the traces of all his
+associates.
+
+The robbers who did the work were usually masked, and although
+suspicions were rife and mutterings began to grow louder, there was no
+actual evidence against Plummer until one day he held up a young man by
+name of Tilden, who voiced his belief that he knew the man who had held
+him up. Further evidence was soon to follow. A pack-train, bound for
+Salt Lake, had no less than eighty thousand dollars in dust in its
+charge, and Plummer had sent out Dutch John and Steve Marshland to hold
+up the train. The freighters were too plucky, and both the bandits were
+wounded, and so marked, although for the time they escaped. George Ives
+also was recognized by one or two victims and began to be watched on
+account of his numerous open murders.
+
+At length, the dead body of a young man named Tiebalt was found in a
+thicket near Alder Gulch, under circumstances showing a revolting
+murder. At last the slumbering spirit of the Vigilantes began to awaken.
+Two dozen men of the camp went out and arrested Long John, George Ives,
+Alex Carter, Whiskey Bill, Bob Zachary, and Johnny Cooper. These men
+were surprised in their camp, and among their long list of weapons were
+some that had been taken from men who had been robbed or murdered. These
+weapons were identified by friends. Old Tex was another man taken in
+charge, and George Hilderman yet another. All these men wanted a "jury
+trial," and wanted it at Virginia City, where Plummer would have
+official influence enough to get his associates released! The captors,
+however, were men from Nevada, the other leading camp in Alder Gulch,
+and they took their prisoners there.
+
+At once a Plummer man hastened out on horseback to get the chief on the
+ground, riding all night across the mountains to Bannack to carry the
+news that the citizens had at last rebelled against anarchy, robbery,
+and murder. On the following morning, two thousand men had gathered at
+Nevada City, and had resolved to try the outlaws. As there was rivalry
+between Virginia and Nevada camps, a jury was made up of twenty-four
+men, twelve from each camp. The miners' court, most dread of all
+tribunals, was in session.
+
+Some forms of the law were observed. Long John was allowed to turn
+state's evidence. He swore that George Ives had killed Tiebalt, and
+declared that he shot him while Tiebalt was on his knees praying, after
+he had been told that he must die. Then a rope was put around his neck
+and he was dragged to a place of concealment in the thicket where the
+body was found. Tiebalt was not dead while so dragged, for his hands
+were found full of grass and twigs which he had clutched. Ives was
+condemned to death, and the law and order men were strong enough to
+suppress the armed disturbance at once started by his friends, none of
+whom could realize that the patient citizens were at last taking the law
+into their own hands. A scaffold was improvised and Ives was hung,--the
+first of the Plummer gang to meet retribution. The others then in
+custody were allowed to go under milder sentences.
+
+The Vigilantes now organized with vigor and determination. One bit of
+testimony was added to another, and one man now dared to voice his
+suspicions to another. Twenty-five determined men set out to secure
+others of the gang now known to have been united in this long
+brotherhood. Some of these men were now fleeing the country, warned by
+the fate of Ives; but the Vigilantes took Red Yager and Buck Stinson and
+Ned Ray, two of them Plummer's deputies, as well as another confederate
+named Brown. The party stopped at the Lorain Ranch, near a cottonwood
+grove, and tried their prisoners without going into town. Red Yager
+confessed in full before he was hung, and it was on his testimony that
+the whole secret league of robbers was exposed and eventually brought to
+justice. He gave the following list:
+
+Henry Plummer was chief of the gang; Bill Bunton, stool-pigeon and
+second in command; George Brown, secretary; Sam Bunton, roadster; Cyrus
+Skinner, fence, spy and roadster; George Shears, horse thief and
+roadster; Frank Parish, horse thief and roadster; Bill Hunter, telegraph
+man and roadster; Ned Ray, council-room keeper at Bannack City; George
+Ives, Stephen Marshland, Dutch John (Wagner), Alex Carter, Whiskey Bill
+(Graves), Johnny Cooper, Buck Stinson, Mexican Frank, Bob Zachary, Boone
+Helm, Clubfoot George (Lane), Billy Terwilliger, Gad Moore, were
+roadsters.
+
+The noose was now tightening around the neck of the outlaw, Henry
+Plummer, whose adroitness had so long stood him in good stead. The
+honest miners found that their sheriff was the leader of the outlaws!
+His doom was said then and there, with that of all these others.
+
+A party of the Virginia City law and order men slipped over to Bannack,
+Henry Plummer's home. In a few hours the news had spread of what had
+happened at the other camps, and a branch organization of the Vigilantes
+was formed for Bannack. Stinson and Ray were now arrested, and then
+Plummer himself, the chief, the brains of all this long-secret band of
+marauders. He was surprised with his coat and arms off, and taken
+prisoner. A few moments later, he was facing a scaffold, where, as
+sheriff, he had lately hung a man. The law had no delays. No court could
+quibble here. Not all Plummer's wealth could save him now, nor all his
+intellect and cool audacity.
+
+An agony of remorse and fear now came upon the outlaw chief. He fell
+upon his knees, called upon God to save him, begged, pleaded, wept like
+a child, declared that he was too wicked to die thus soon and
+unprepared. It was useless. The full proof of all his many crimes was
+laid before him.
+
+Ray, writhing and cursing, was the first to be hanged. He got his finger
+under the rope around his neck and died hard, but died. Stinson, also
+cursing, went next. It was then time for Plummer, and those who had this
+work in hand felt compunction at hanging a man so able, so urbane and so
+commanding. None the less, he was told to prepare. He asked for time to
+pray, and was told to pray from the cross-beam. He said good-by to a
+friend or two, and asked his executioners to "give him a good drop." He
+seemed to fear suffering, he who had caused so much suffering. To oblige
+him, the men lifted his body high up and let it fall, and he died with
+little struggle.
+
+To cut short a long story of bloody justice, it may be added that of the
+men named as guilty by Yager every one was arrested, tried, and hung by
+the Vigilantes. Plummer for some time must have dreaded detection, for
+he tried to cover up his guilt by writing back home to the States that
+he was in danger of being hanged on account of his Union sympathies. His
+family would not believe his guilt, and looked on him as a martyr. They
+sent out a brother and sister to look into the matter, but these too
+found proof which left them no chance to doubt. The whole ghastly
+revelation of a misspent life lay before them. Even Plummer's wife, whom
+he loved very much and who was a good woman, was at last convinced of
+what at first she could not believe. Plummer had been able to conceal
+from even his wife the least suspicion that he was not an honorable man.
+His wife was east in the States at the time of his death.
+
+Plummer went under his true name. George Ives was a Wisconsin boy from
+near Racine. Both he and Plummer were twenty-seven years of age when
+killed, but they had compressed much evil into so short a span. Plummer
+himself was a master of men, a brave and cool spirit, an expert with
+weapons, and in all not a bad specimen of the bad man at his worst. He
+was a murderer, but after all was not enough a murderer. No outlaw of
+later years so closely resembled the great outlaw, John A. Murrell, as
+did Henry Plummer, but the latter differed in one regard:--he spared
+victims, who later arose to accuse him.
+
+The frontier has produced few bloodier records than Plummer's. He was
+principal or accessory, as has been stated, in more than one hundred
+murders, not to mention innumerable robberies and thefts. His life was
+lived out in scenes typical of the early Western frontier. The madness
+of adventure in new wild fields, the lust of gold and its unparalleled
+abundance drove to crime men who might have been respected and of note
+in proper ranks of life and in other surroundings.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII
+
+Boone Helm--_A Murderer, Cannibal, and Robber_--_A Typical Specimen of
+Absolute Human Depravity_.
+
+
+Henry Plummer was what might be called a good instance of the gentleman
+desperado, if such a thing be possible; a man of at least a certain
+amount of refinement, and certainly one who, under different
+surroundings, might have led a different life. For the sake of contrast,
+if for nothing else, we may take the case of Boone Helm, one of
+Plummer's gang, who was the opposite of Plummer in every way except the
+readiness to rob and kill. Boone Helm was bad, and nothing in the world
+could ever have made him anything but bad. He was, by birth and
+breeding, low, coarse, cruel, animal-like and utterly depraved, and for
+him no name but ruffian can fitly apply.
+
+Helm was born in Kentucky, but his family moved to Missouri during his
+early youth, so that the boy was brought up on the borderland between
+civilization and the savage frontier; for this was about the time of the
+closing days of the old Santa F� Trail, and the towns of Independence
+and Westport were still sending out their wagon trains to the far
+mountain regions. By the time Boone Helm was grown, and soon after his
+marriage, the great gold craze of California broke out, and he joined
+the rush westward. Already he was a murderer, and already he had a
+reputation as a quarrelsome and dangerous man. He was of powerful build
+and turbulent temper, delighting in nothing so much as feats of
+strength, skill, and hardihood. His community was glad to be rid of him,
+as was, indeed, any community in which he ever lived.
+
+In the California diggings, Helm continued the line of life mapped out
+for him from birth. He met men of his own kidney there, and was ever
+ready for a duel with weapons. In this way he killed several men, no one
+knows how many; but this sort of thing was so common in the case of so
+many men in those days that little attention was paid to it. It must
+have been a very brutal murder which at length caused him to flee the
+Coast to escape the vengeance of the miners. He headed north and east,
+after a fashion of the times following the California boom, and was
+bound for the mountain placers in 1853, when he is recorded as appearing
+at the Dalles, Oregon. He and a half-dozen companions, whom he had
+picked up on the way, and most of whom were strangers to each other, now
+started out for Fort Hall, Idaho, intending to go from there to a point
+below Salt Lake City.
+
+The beginning of the terrible mountain winter season caught these men
+somewhere west of the main range in eastern Oregon, in the depths of as
+rugged a mountain region as any of the West. They were on horseback, and
+so could carry small provisions; but in some way they pushed on deeper
+and deeper into the mountains, until they got to the Bannack river,
+where they were attacked by Indians and chased into a country none of
+them knew. At last they got over east as far as the Soda Springs on the
+Bear river, where they were on well-known ground. By this time, however,
+their horses had given out, and their food was exhausted. They killed
+their horses, made snowshoes with the hides, and sought to reach Fort
+Hall. The party was now reduced to one of those awful starving marches
+of the wilderness which are now and then chronicled in Western life.
+This meant that the weak must perish where they fell.
+
+The strength of Helm and one of the others, Burton, enabled them to push
+on ahead, leaving their companions behind in the mountains. Almost
+within reach of Fort Hall, Burton gave out and was left behind in an
+abandoned cabin. Helm pushed on into the old stockade, but found it also
+abandoned for the winter season, and he could get no food there. He then
+went back to where he had left Burton, and, according to his own report,
+he was trying to get wood for a fire when he heard a pistol-shot and
+returned to find that Burton had killed himself. He stayed on at this
+spot, and, like a hyena, preyed upon the dead body of his companion. He
+ate one leg of the body, and then, wrapping up the other in a piece of
+old shirt, threw it across his shoulder and started on further east. He
+had, before this on the march, declared to the party that he had
+practiced cannibalism at an earlier time, and proposed to do so again if
+it became necessary on this trip across the mountains. His calm threat
+was now verified. Helm was found at last at an Indian camp by John W.
+Powell, who learned that he was as hard a character as he had ever run
+across. None the less, he took care of Helm, gave him food and clothes,
+and took him to the settlements around Salt Lake. Powell found that Helm
+had a bag containing over fourteen hundred dollars in coin, which he had
+carried across the divide with him through all his hardships. He would
+take no pay from Helm, and the latter never even thanked him for his
+kindness, but left him as soon as he reached the Mormon settlements.
+
+Here the abandoned ruffian boasted of what he had done, and settled down
+for a brief time to the customary enjoyments of the rough when in town.
+He spent his money, hired out as a Danite, killed a couple of men whom
+the Mormons wanted removed, and soon got so bad that he had to leave.
+Once more he headed west to California, and once more he started back
+north from San Francisco, for reasons satisfactory to himself. While in
+California, as was later learned, he undertook to rob and kill a man at
+an outlying ranch, who had taken him in and befriended him when he was
+in need and in flight from vengeance. He showed no understanding of the
+feeling of gratitude, no matter what was done for him or how great was
+his own extremity.
+
+In Oregon Helm went back to robbery as his customary means of support,
+and he killed several men at this time of his life, how many will never
+be known. In 1862, as the mountain placers were now beginning to draw
+the crowds of mining men, it was natural that Boone Helm should show up
+at Florence. Here he killed a man in cold blood, in treachery, while his
+enemy was not armed, and after their quarrel had been compromised. This
+victim was Dutch Fred, a man of reputation as a fighter, but he had
+never offended Helm, who killed him at the instigation of an enemy of
+his victim, and possibly for hire. He shot Fred while the latter stood
+looking him in the face, unarmed, and, missing him with the first shot,
+took deliberate aim with the second and murdered his man in cold blood.
+
+This was pretty bad even for Florence, and he had to leave. That fall he
+turned up far to the north, on the Fraser river, in British Columbia.
+Here he was once more reduced to danger on a starving foot march in the
+wilderness, and here, once more, he was guilty of eating the body of
+his companion, whom he is supposed to have slain. He was sent back by
+the British authorities, and for a time was held at Portland, Oregon,
+for safe keeping. Later he was tried at Florence for killing Dutch Fred,
+but the witnesses had disappeared, and people had long ago lost interest
+in the crime by reason of others more recent. Helm escaped justice and
+was supposed to have gone to Texas; but he soon appeared in the several
+settlements which have been mentioned in the foregoing pages, and moved
+from one to the other. He killed many more men, how many in all was
+never known.
+
+The courage and hardihood of Boone Helm were in evidence to the close of
+his life. Three men of the Vigilantes did the dangerous work of
+arresting him, and took him by closing in on him as he stood in the
+street talking. "If I'd had a chance," said he, "or if I had guessed
+what you all were up to, you'd never have taken me." He claimed not to
+know what was wanted of him when brought before the judges of the
+Vigilante court, and solemnly declared that he had never killed a man in
+all his life! They made him kiss the Bible and swear to this over again
+just to see to what lengths his perjured and depraved soul would go. He
+swore on the Bible with perfect calmness! His captors were not moved by
+this, and indeed Helm was little expectant that they would be. He called
+aside one of them whom he knew, declined a clergyman, and confessed to a
+murder or so in Missouri and in California, admitted that he had been
+imprisoned once or twice, but denied that he had been a road agent. He
+accused some of his warmest friends of the latter crime. Jack Gallegher,
+also under arrest, heard him thus incriminate himself and others of the
+gang and called him all the names in the calendar, telling him he ought
+to die.
+
+"I have looked at death in all forms," said Helm, coolly, "and I am not
+afraid to die." He then asked for a glass of whiskey, as did a good many
+of these murderers when they were brought to the gallows. From that time
+on he was cool and unconcerned, and showed a finish worthy of one
+ambitious to be thought wholly bad.
+
+There were six thousand men assembled in Virginia City to see the
+executions of these criminals, who were fast being rounded up and hung
+by the citizens. The place of execution was in a half-finished log
+building. The ropes were passed over the ridge-pole, and, as the front
+of the building was open, a full view was offered of the murderers as
+they stood on the boxes arranged for the drops. Boone Helm looked around
+at his friends placed for death, and told Jack Gallegher to "stop making
+such a fuss." "There's no use being afraid to die," said he; and indeed
+there probably never lived a man more actually devoid of all sense of
+fear. He valued neither the life of others nor his own. He saw that the
+end had come, and was careless about the rest. He had a sore finger,
+which was tied up, and this seemed to trouble him more than anything
+else. There was some delay about the confessions and the last offices of
+those who prayed for the condemned, and this seemed to irritate Boone
+Helm.
+
+"For God's sake," said he, "if you're going to hang me, I want you to do
+it and get through with it. If not, I want you to tie up my finger for
+me."
+
+"Give me that overcoat of yours, Jack," he said to Gallegher, as the
+latter was stripped for the noose.
+
+"You won't need it now," replied Gallegher, who was dying blasphemous.
+About then, George Lane, one of the line of men about to be hung,
+jumped off his box on his own account. "There's one gone to hell,"
+remarked Boone Helm, philosophically. Gallegher was hanged next, and as
+he struggled his former friend watched him calmly. "Kick away, old
+fellow," said Boone Helm. Then, as though suddenly resolved to end it,
+he commented, "My turn next. I'll be in hell with you in a minute!"
+
+Boone Helm was a Confederate and a bitter one, and this seems to have
+remained with him to the last. "Every man for his principles!" he
+shouted. "Hurrah for Jeff Davis! Let her rip!" He sprang off the box;
+and so he finished, utterly hard and reckless to the last.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IX
+
+Death Scenes of Desperadoes--_How Bad Men Died_--_The Last Moments of
+Desperadoes Who Finished on the Scaffold_--_Utterances of Terror, of
+Defiance, and of Cowardice_.
+
+
+There is always a grim sort of curiosity regarding the way in which
+notoriously desperate men meet their end; and perhaps this is as natural
+as is the curiosity regarding the manner in which they lived. "Did he
+die game?" is one of the questions asked by bad men among themselves.
+"Did he die with his boots on?" is another. The last was the test of
+actual or, as it were, of professional badness. One who admitted himself
+bad was willing to die with his boots on. Honest men were not, and more
+than one early Western man fatally shot had his friends take off his
+boots before he died, so that he might not go with the stain of
+desperadoism attached to his name.
+
+Some bad men died unrepentant and defiant. Others broke down and wept
+and begged. A great oblivion enshrouds most of these utterances, for few
+Vigilante movements ever reached importance enough to permit those who
+participated to make publicly known their own participation in them.
+Indeed, no man ever concerned in a law and order execution ever liked to
+talk about it. Tradition, however, has preserved the exact utterances of
+many bad men. Report is preserved, in a general way, of many of the
+rustlers hung by the cattle men in the "regulator" movement in Montana,
+Wyoming, and Nebraska in the late '70's. "Give me a chew of tobacco,
+folks," said one. "Meet you in hell, fellows," remarked others of these
+rustlers when the last moment arrived. "So-long, boys," was a not
+infrequent remark as the noose tightened. Many of these men were brave,
+and some of them were hung for what they considered no crime.
+
+Henry Plummer, whose fate has been described in a previous chapter, was
+one of those who died in a sense of guilt and terror. His was a nature
+of some sensitiveness, not callous like that of Boone Helm. Plummer
+begged for life on any terms, asked the Vigilantes to cut off his
+ears and hands and tongue, anything to mark him and leave him helpless,
+but to leave him alive. He protested that he was too wicked to die, fell
+on his knees, cried aloud, promised, besought. On the whole, his end
+hardly left him enshrouded with much glamor of courage; although the
+latter term is relative in the bad man, who might be brave at one time
+and cowardly at another, as was often proved.
+
+[Illustration: THE SCENE OF MANY HANGINGS]
+
+Ned Ray and Buck Stinson died full of profanity and curses, heaping upon
+their executioners all manner of abuse. They seemed to be animated by no
+understanding of a life hereafter, and were concerned only in their
+animal instinct to hold on to this one as long as they might. Yet
+Stinson, of a good Indiana family, was a bright and studious and
+well-read boy, of whom many good things had been predicted.
+
+Dutch John, when faced with death, acted much as his chief, Henry
+Plummer, had done. He begged and pleaded, and asked for mutilation,
+disfigurement, anything, if only he might still live. But, like Plummer,
+at the very last moment he pulled together and died calmly. "How long
+will it take me to die?" he asked. "I have never seen anyone hanged."
+They told him it would be very short and that he would not suffer much,
+and this seemed to please him. Nearly all these desperadoes seemed to
+dread death by hanging. The Territory of Utah allowed a felon convicted
+under death penalty to choose the manner of his death, whether by
+hanging, beheading, or shooting; but no record remains of any prisoner
+who did not choose death by shooting. A curiosity as to the sensation of
+hanging was evinced in the words of several who were hung by Vigilantes.
+
+In the largest hanging made in this Montana work, there were five men
+executed one after the other: Clubfoot George, Hayes Lyons, Jack
+Gallegher, Boone Helm, and Frank Parish, all known to be members of the
+Plummer gang. George and Parish at first declared that they were
+innocent--the first word of most of these men when they were
+apprehended. Parish died silent. George had spent some hours with a
+clergyman, and was apparently repentant. Just as he reached the box, he
+saw a friend peering through a crack in the wall. "Good-by, old fellow,"
+he called out, and sprang to his own death without waiting for the box
+to be pulled from under his feet.
+
+Hayes Lyons asked to see his mistress to say good-by to her before he
+died, but was refused. He kept on pleading for his life to the very last
+instant, after he had told the men to take his body to his mistress for
+burial. This woman was really the cause of Lyons' undoing. He had been
+warned, and would have left the country but for her. A woman was very
+often the cause of a desperado's apprehension.
+
+Jack Gallegher in his last moments was, if possible, more repulsive even
+than Boone Helm. The latter was brave, but Gallegher was a coward, and
+spent his time in cursing his captors and pitying himself. He tried to
+be merry. "How do I look with a halter around my neck?" he asked
+facetiously of a bystander. He asked often for whiskey and this was
+given him. A moment later he said, "I want one more drink of whiskey
+before I die." This was when the noose was tight around his neck, and
+the men were disgusted with him for the remark. One remarked, "Give him
+the whiskey"; so the rope, which was passed over the beam above him and
+fastened to a side log of the building, was loosened to oblige him.
+"Slack off the rope, can't you," cried Gallegher, "and let a man have a
+parting drink." He bent his head down against the rope and drank a
+tumblerful of whiskey at a gulp. Then he called down curses on the men
+who were about him, and kept it up until they cut him short by jerking
+away the box from under his feet.
+
+A peculiar instance of unconscious, but grim, humor was afforded at
+Gallegher's execution. Just as he was led to the box and ordered to
+climb up, he drew a pocket-knife and declared he would kill himself and
+not be hanged in public. A Vigilante covered him with a six-shooter.
+"Drop that, Jack," he exclaimed, "or I'll blow your head off." So
+Gallegher, having the choice of death between shooting, hanging or
+beheading, chose hanging after all! He was a coward.
+
+Cy Skinner, when on the way to the scaffold, broke and ran, calling on
+his captors to shoot. They declined, and hanged him. Alex Carter, who
+was on the fatal line with Skinner in that lot, was disgusted with him
+for running. He asked for a smoke while the men were waiting, and died
+with a lie on his lips--"I am innocent." That is not an infrequent
+declaration of criminals at the last. The lie is only a blind clinging
+to the last possible means of escape, and is the same as the instinct
+for self-preservation, a crime swallowed up in guilt.
+
+Johnny Cooper wanted a "good smoke" before he died, and was given it.
+Bob Zachary died without fear, and praying forgiveness on his
+executioners. Steve Marshland asked to be pardoned because of his youth.
+"You should have thought of that before," was the grim reply. He was
+adjudged old enough to die, as he had been old enough to kill.
+
+George Shears was one of the gamest of the lot. He seemed indifferent
+about it all after his capture, and, when he was told that he was to be
+hanged, he remarked that he ought to be glad it was no worse. He was
+executed in the barn at a ranch where he was caught, and, conveniences
+being few, a ladder was used instead of a box or other drop. He was told
+to ascend the latter, and did so without the least hesitation or
+evidence of concern. "Gentlemen," said he, "I am not used to this
+business, never having been hung before. Shall I jump off or slide off?"
+They told him to "jump, of course," and he took this advice. "All right.
+Good-by!" he said, and sprang off with unconcern.
+
+Whiskey Bill was not given much chance for last words. He was hung from
+horseback, the noose being dropped down from a tree to his neck as he
+sat on a horse behind one of the Vigilantes. "Good-by, Bill," was the
+remark of the latter, as he spurred his horse and left Bill hanging.
+
+One of the most singular phenomena of these executions was that of Bill
+Hunter, who, while hanging by the neck, went through all the motions of
+drawing and firing his six-shooter six times. Whether the action was
+conscious or unconscious it is impossible to tell.
+
+Bill Bunton resisted arrest and was pugnacious, of course declaring his
+innocence. At the last he showed great gameness. He was particular about
+the manner in which the knot of the rope was adjusted to his neck,
+seeming, as did many of these men, to dread any suffering while hanging.
+He asked if he might jump off the platform himself, and was told he
+might if he liked. "I care no more for hanging," he explained, "than I
+do for taking a drink of water, but I'd like to have my neck broken. I'd
+like to have a mountain three hundred feet high to jump off from. Now,
+I'll give you the time: One--two--three. Here goes!"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter X
+
+Joseph A. Slade--_A Man with a Newspaper Reputation_--_Bad, but Not as
+Bad as Painted_--_Hero of the Overland Express Route_--_A Product of
+Courage Plus Whiskey, and the End of the Product_.
+
+
+One of the best-known desperadoes the West ever produced was Joseph A.
+Slade, agent of the Overland stage line on the central or mountain
+division, about 1860, and hence in charge of large responsibilities in a
+strip of country more than six hundred miles in extent, which possessed
+all the ingredients for trouble in plenty. Slade lived, in the heyday of
+his career, just about the time when men from the East were beginning to
+write about the newly discovered life of the West. Bret Harte had left
+his indelible stamp upon the literature of the land, and Mark Twain was
+soon to spread widely his impressions of life as seen in "Roughing It";
+while countless newspaper men and book writers were edging out and
+getting hearsay stories of things known at first hand by a very few
+careful and conscientious writers.
+
+The hearsay man engaged in discovering the West always clung to the
+regular lines of travel; and almost every one who passed across the
+mountains on the Overland stage line would hear stories about the
+desperate character of Slade. These stories grew by newspaper
+multiplication, until at length the man was owner of the reputation of a
+fiend, a ghoul, and a murderer. There was a wide difference between this
+and the truth. As a matter of fact, there were many worse desperadoes on
+the border.
+
+Slade was born at Carlisle, Illinois, and served in the Mexican War in
+1848. He appears to have gone into the Overland service in 1859. At once
+he plunged into the business of the stage line, and soon became a terror
+to the thieves and outlaws, several of whom he was the means of having
+shot or hung, although he himself was nothing of a man-hunter at the
+time; and indeed, in all his life he killed but one man--a case of a
+reputation beyond desert, and an instance of a reputation fostered by
+admiring but ignorant writers.
+
+Slade was reported to have tied one of his enemies, Jules Reni, more
+commonly called Jules, to the stake, and to have tortured him for a day,
+shooting him to pieces bit by bit, and cutting off his ears, one of
+which he always afterward wore in his pocket as a souvenir. There was
+little foundation for this reputation beyond the fact that he did kill
+Jules, and did it after Jules had been captured and disarmed by other
+men. But he had been threatened time and again by Jules, and was once
+shot and left for dead by the latter, who emptied a pistol and a shotgun
+at Slade, and left him lying with thirteen bullets and buckshot in his
+body. Jules thought he did not need to shoot Slade any more after that,
+and gave directions for his burial as soon as he should have died. At
+that Slade rose on his elbow and promised Jules he would live and would
+wear one of his, Jules', ears on his watch chain; a threat which no
+doubt gave rise to a certain part of his ghastly reputation. Jules was
+hung for a while by the stage people, but was let down and released on
+promise of leaving the country never to return. He did not keep his
+promise, and it had been better for him if he had.
+
+Jules Reni was a big Frenchman, one of that sort of early ranchers who
+were owners of small ranches and a limited number of cattle and
+horses--just enough to act as a shield for thefts of live stock, and to
+offer encouragement to such thefts. Before long Jules was back at his
+old stamping-grounds, where he was looked on as something of a bully;
+and at once he renewed his threats against Slade.
+
+Slade went to the officers of the military post at Laramie, the only
+kind of authority then in the land, which had no sort of courts or
+officers, and asked them what he should do. They told him to have Jules
+captured and then to kill him, else Jules would do the same for him.
+Slade sent four men out to the ranch where Jules was stopping, about
+twelve miles from Laramie, while he followed in the stage-coach. These
+men captured Jules at a ranch a little farther down the line, and left
+him prisoner at the stage station. Here Slade found him in the corral, a
+prisoner, unarmed and at his mercy, and without hesitation he shot him,
+the ball striking him in the mouth. His victim fell and feigned death,
+but Slade--who was always described as a good pistol shot--saw that he
+was not killed, and told him he should have time to make his will if he
+desired. There is color in the charge of deliberate cruelty, but
+perhaps rude warrant for the cruelty, under the circumstances of
+treachery in which Jules had pursued Slade. At least, some time elapsed
+while a man was running back and forward from the house to the corral
+with pen and ink and paper. Jules never signed his will. When the last
+penful of ink came out to the corral, Jules was dead, shot through the
+head by Slade. This looks like cruelty of an unnecessary sort, and like
+taunting a helpless victim; but here the warrant for all the Slade sort
+of stories seems to end, and there is no evidence of his mutilating his
+victim, as was often described.
+
+Slade went back to the officers of Fort Laramie, and they said he had
+done right and did not detain him. Nor did any of Jules' friends ever
+molest him. He returned to his work on the Overland. After this he grew
+more turbulent, and was guilty of high-handed outrages and of a general
+disposition to run things wherever he went. The officers at Fort Halleck
+arrested him and refused to turn him over to the stage line unless the
+latter agreed to discharge him. This was done, and now Slade, out of
+work, began to be bad at heart. He took to drink and drifting, and so at
+last turned up at the Beaverhead diggings in 1863, not much different
+from many others of the bad folk to be found there.
+
+Quiet enough when sober, Slade was a maniac in drink, and this latter
+became his habitual condition. Now and again he sobered up, and he
+always was a business man and animated by an ambition to get on in the
+world. He worked here and there in different capacities, and at last
+settled on a ranch a dozen miles or so from Virginia City, where he
+lived with his wife, a robust, fine-looking woman of great courage and
+very considerable beauty, of whom he was passionately fond; although she
+lived almost alone in the remote cabin in the mountains, while Slade
+pursued his avocations, such as they were, in the settlements along
+Alder Gulch.
+
+Slade now began to grow ugly and hard, and to exult in terrorizing the
+hard men of those hard towns. He would strike a man in the face while
+drinking with him, would rob his friends while playing cards, would ride
+into the saloons and break up the furniture, and destroy property with
+seeming exultation at his own maliciousness. He was often arrested,
+warned, and fined; and sometimes he defied such officers as went after
+him and refused to be arrested. His whole conduct made him a menace to
+the peace of this little community, which was now endeavoring to become
+more decent, and he fell under the fatal scrutiny of the Vigilantes, who
+concluded that the best thing to do was to hang Slade. He had never
+killed anyone as yet, although he had abused many; but it was sure that
+he would kill some one if allowed to run on; and, moreover, it was
+humiliating to have one man trying to run the town and doing as he
+pleased. Slade was to learn what society means, and what the social
+compact means, as did many of these wild men who had been running as
+savages outside of and independent of the law. Slade got wind of the
+deliberations of the Committee, as well he might when six hundred men
+came down from Nevada Camp to Virginia City to help in the court of the
+miners, before which Slade was now to come. It was the Nevada Vigilantes
+who were most strongly of the belief that death and not banishment was
+the proper punishment for Slade. The leader of the marching men calmly
+told Slade that the Committee had decided to hang him; and, once the
+news was sure, Slade broke out into lamentations.
+
+This was often the case with men who had been bullies and terrors. They
+weakened when in the hands of a stronger power. Slade crept about on his
+hands and knees, begging like a baby. "My God! My God!" he cried. "Must
+I die? Oh, my poor wife, my poor wife! My God, men, you can't mean that
+I'm to die!"
+
+They did mean it, and neither his importunities nor those of his friends
+had avail. His life had been too rough and violent and was too full of
+menace to others. He had had his fair frontier chance and had misused
+it. Some wept at his prayers, but none relented. In broad daylight, the
+procession moved down the street, and soon Slade was swinging from the
+beam of a corral gate, one more example of the truth that when man
+belongs to society he owes duty to society and else must suffer at its
+hands. This was the law.
+
+Slade's wife was sent for and reached town soon after Slade's body was
+cut down and laid out. She loaded the Vigilantes with imprecations, and
+showed the most heartbroken grief. The two had been very deeply
+attached. She was especially regretful that Slade had been hanged and
+not shot. He was worth a better death than that, she protested.
+
+Slade's body was preserved in alcohol and kept out at the lone ranch
+cabin all that winter. In the spring it was sent down to Salt Lake City
+and buried there. As that was a prominent point on the overland trail,
+the tourists did the rest. The saga of Slade as a bad man was widely
+disseminated.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XI
+
+The Desperado of the Plains--_Lawlessness Founded on Loose
+Methods_--_The Rustlers of the Cow Country_--_Excuses for Their
+Acts_--_The Approach of the Commercial West_.
+
+
+One pronounced feature of early Western life will have been remarked in
+the story of the mountain settlements with which we have been concerned,
+and that is the transient and migratory character of the population. It
+is astonishing what distances were traveled by the bold men who followed
+the mining stampedes all over the wilderness of the upper Rockies, in
+spite of the unspeakable hardships of a region where travel at its best
+was rude, and travel at its worst well-nigh an impossibility. The West
+was first peopled by wanderers, nomads, even in its mountain regions,
+which usually attach their population to themselves and cut off the
+disposition to roam. This nomad nature of the adventurers made law
+almost an impossible thing. A town was organized and then abandoned, on
+the spur of necessity or rumor. Property was unstable, taxes impossible,
+and any corps of executive officers difficult of maintenance. Before
+there can be law there must be an attached population.
+
+The lawlessness of the real West was therefore much a matter of
+conditions after all, rather than of morals. It proved above all things
+that human nature is very much akin, and that good men may go wrong when
+sufficiently tempted by great wealth left unguarded. The first and
+second decades after the close of the civil war found the great placers
+of the Rockies and Sierras exhausted, and quartz mines taking their
+place. The same period, as has been shown, marked the advent of the
+great cattle herds from the South upon the upper ranges of the
+territories beyond the Missouri river. By this time, the plains began to
+call to the adventurers as the mines recently had called.
+
+Here, then, was wealth, loose, unattached, apparently almost unowned,
+nomad wealth, and waiting for a nomad population to share it in one way
+or another. Once more, the home was lacking, the permanent abode;
+wherefore, once more the law was also lacking, and man ruled himself
+after the ancient savage ways. By this time frontiersmen were well armed
+with repeating weapons, which now used fixed ammunition. There appeared
+on the plains more and better armed men than were ever known,
+unorganized, in any land at any period of the earth's history; and the
+plains took up what the mountains had begun in wild and desperate deeds.
+
+The only property on the arid plains at that time was that of live
+stock. Agriculture had not come, and it was supposed could never come.
+The vast herds of cattle from the lower ranges, Texas and Mexico, pushed
+north to meet the railroads, now springing westward across the plains;
+but a large proportion of these cattle were used as breeding stock to
+furnish the upper cow range with horned population. Colorado, Wyoming,
+Montana, western Nebraska, the Dakotas, discovered that they could raise
+range cattle as well as the southern ranges, and fatten them far better;
+so presently thousands upon thousands of cattle were turned loose,
+without a fence in those thousands of miles, to exist as best they
+might, and guarded as best might be by a class of men as nomadic as
+their herds. These cattle were cheap at that time, and they made a
+general source of food supply much appreciated in a land but just
+depopulated of its buffalo. For a long time it was but a venial crime to
+kill a cow and eat it if one were hungry. A man's horse was sacred, but
+his cow was not, because there were so many cows, and they were shifting
+and changing about so much at best.
+
+The ownership of these herds was widely scattered and difficult to
+trace. A man might live in Texas and have herds in Montana, and _vice
+versa_. His property right was known only by the brand upon the animal,
+his being but the tenure of a sign.
+
+"The respect for this sign was the whole creed of the cattle trade.
+Without a fence, without an atom of actual control, the cattle man held
+his property absolutely. It mingled with the property of others, but it
+was never confused therewith. It wandered a hundred miles from him, and
+he knew not where it was, but it was surely his and sure to find him. To
+touch it was crime. To appropriate it meant punishment. Common necessity
+made common custom, common custom made common law, and common law made
+statutory law."[E]
+
+[Footnote E: "The Story of the Cowboy," by E. Hough. D. Appleton & Co.
+New York.]
+
+The old _fierro_ or iron mark of the Spanish cattle owner, and his
+_venta_ or sale-brand to another had become common law all over the
+Southwest when the Anglo-Saxon first struck that region. The Saxon
+accepted these customs as wise and rational, and soon they were the
+American law all over the American plains.
+
+The great bands of cattle ran almost free in the Southwest for many
+years, each carrying the brand of the owner, if the latter had ever seen
+it or cared to brand it. Many cattle roamed free without any brand
+whatever, and no one could tell who owned them. When the northern ranges
+opened, this question of unbranded cattle still remained, and the
+"maverick" industry was still held matter of sanction, there seeming to
+be enough for all, and the day being one of glorious freedom and plenty,
+the baronial day of the great and once unexhausted West.
+
+Now the _venta_, or brand indicating the sale of an animal to another
+owner, began to complicate matters to a certain extent. A purchaser
+could put his own _fierro_ brand on a cow, and that meant that he now
+owned it. But then some suspicious soul asked, "How shall we know whence
+such and such cows came, and how tell whether or not this man did not
+steal them outright from his neighbor's herd and put his own brand on
+them?" Here was the origin of the bill of sale, and also of the counter
+brand or "vent brand," as it is known upon the upper ranges. The owner
+duplicated his recorded brand upon another recorded part of the animal,
+and this meant his deed of conveyance, when taken together with the bill
+of sale over his commercial signature. Of course, several conveyances
+would leave the hide much scarred and hard to read; and, as there were
+"road brands" also used to protect the property while in transit from
+the South to the North or from the range to the market, the reading of
+the brands and the determination of ownership of the animal might be,
+and very often was, a nice matter, and one not always settled without
+argument; and argument in the West often meant bloodshed in those days.
+Some hard men started up in trade near the old cattle trails, and made a
+business of disputing brands with the trail drivers. Sometimes they
+made good their claims, and sometimes they did not. There were graves
+almost in line from Texas to Montana.
+
+It is now perfectly easy to see what a wide and fertile field was here
+offered to men who did not want to observe the law. Here was property to
+be had without work, and property whose title could easily be called
+into question; whose ownership was a matter of testimony and record, to
+be sure, but testimony which could be erased or altered by the same
+means which once constituted it a record and sign. The brand was made
+with an iron, and it could be changed with an iron. A large and
+profitable industry arose in changing these brands. The rustler,
+brand-burner or brand-blotcher now became one of the new Western
+characters, and a new sort of bad-manism had its birth.
+
+"It is very easy to see how temptation was offered to the cow thief and
+'brand blotter.' Here were all these wild cattle running loose over the
+country. The imprint of a hot iron on a hide made the creature the
+property of the brander, provided no one else had branded it before. The
+time of priority was matter of proof. With the handy "running-iron" or
+straight rod, which was always attached to his saddle when he rode out,
+could not the cow thief erase a former brand and put over it one of his
+own? Could he not, for instance, change a U into an O, or a V into a
+diamond, or a half-circle into a circle? Could he not, moreover, kill
+and skin an animal and sell the beef as his own? Between him and the
+owner was only this little mark. Between him and changing this mark was
+nothing but his moral principles. The range was very wide. Hardly a
+figure would show on that unwinking horizon all day long. And what was a
+heifer here and there?"
+
+Such was the temptation and opportunity which led many a man to step
+over the line between right and wrong. Their excuse lies in the fact
+that the line was newly drawn and that it was often vague and inexact.
+It was easy, from killing or rebranding an occasional cow, to see the
+profits of larger operation. The faithful cowboys who cared for these
+herds and protected them even with their lives in the interest of absent
+owners began in time to tire of working on a salary, and settled down
+into little ranches of their own, starting with a herd of cattle
+lawfully purchased and branded. An occasional maverick came across their
+range and they branded it. A brand was faint and not legible, and they
+put their own iron over it. They learned that pyrography with a hot
+poker was very profitable. The rest was easy. The first step was the one
+that counted; but who could tell where that first step was taken?
+
+At any rate, cattle owners began to take notice of their cows as the
+prices went up, and they had laws made to protect property rapidly
+enhancing in value. Cow owners were required to have fixed or
+stencil-irons, and were forbidden to trace a pattern with a straight
+iron or "running-iron." Each ranch must have its own iron or stencil.
+Texas as early as the '60's and '70's passed laws forbidding the use of
+the running-iron altogether, so that after that it was not safe to be
+caught riding the range with a straight iron under the saddle flap. Any
+man so discovered had to do some quick explaining.
+
+The next step after this was the organization of the cattle associations
+in the several territories and states which made the home of the cattle
+trade. These associations banded together in a national association.
+Detectives were placed at the stockyards in Chicago and Kansas City,
+charged with the finding of cattle stolen on the range and shipped with
+or without clean brands. In short, there had now grown up an armed and
+legal warfare between the cow men themselves--in the first place very
+large-handed thieves--and the rustlers and "little fellows" who were
+accused of being too liberal with their brand blotching. The prosecution
+of these men was undertaken with something of the old vigor that
+characterized the pursuit of horse thieves, with this difference, that,
+whereas all the world had hated a horse thief as a common enemy, very
+much of the world found excuse for the so-called rustler, who was known
+to be doing only what his accusers had done before him.
+
+There may be a certain interest attaching to the methods of the range
+riders of this day, and those who care to go into the history of the
+cattle trade in its early days are referred to the work earlier quoted,
+where the matter is more fully covered.[F] Brief reference will suffice
+here.
+
+[Footnote F: "The Story of the Cowboy." By E. Hough. D. Appleton & Co.]
+
+The rustler might brand with his own straight running-iron, as it were,
+writing over again the brand he wished to change; but this was clumsy
+and apt to be detected, for the new wound would slough and look
+suspicious. A piece of red-hot hay wire or telegraph wire was a better
+tool, for this could be twisted into the shape of almost any registered
+brand, and it would so cunningly connect the edges of both that the
+whole mark would seem to be one scar of the same date. The fresh burn
+fitted in with the older one so that it was impossible to swear that it
+was not a part of the first brand mark. Yet another way of softening a
+fresh and fraudulent brand was to brand through a wet blanket with a
+heavy iron, which thus left a wound deep enough, but not apt to slough,
+and so betray a brand done long after the round-up, and hence subject to
+scrutiny.
+
+As to the ways in which brands were altered in their lines, these were
+many and most ingenious. A sample page will be sufficient to show the
+possibilities of the art by which the rustler set over to his own herds
+on the free range the cows of his far-away neighbor, whom, perhaps, he
+did not love as himself. The list on the opposite page is taken from
+"The Story of the Cowboy."
+
+Such, then, was the burglar of the range, the rustler, to whom most of
+the mysterious and untraceable crimes were ascribed. Such also were
+the excuses to be offered for some of the men who did what to them did
+not seem wrong acts. The sudden hostility of the newly-come cow men
+embittered and inflamed them, and from this it was easy and natural to
+the arbitrament of arms.
+
+[Illustration: HOW THE RUSTLER WORKED
+The above plate illustrates the manner in which cow-brands were changed.
+The original brand appears in each case to the left, and the various
+alterations follow. It will be noted that with every change there is
+something added--the rule always adopted by the swindler]
+
+The bad man of the plains dates to this era, and his acts may be
+attributed to these causes. There were to be found among these men many
+refugees and outlaws, as well as many better men gone wrong through
+point of view. Fierce and far were the battles between the rustlers and
+the cow barons. Commerce had its way at last. The lawless man had to go,
+and he had to go even before the law had come.
+
+The Vigilantes of the cattle range, organizing first in Montana and
+working southward, made a clean sweep in their work. In one campaign
+they killed somewhere between sixty and eighty men accused of cattle
+rustling. They hung thirteen men on one railroad bridge one morning in
+northwestern Nebraska. The statement is believed to be correct that, in
+the ten years from 1876 to 1886, they executed more men without process
+of law than have been executed under the law in all the United States
+since then. These lynchings also were against the law. In short, it may
+perhaps begin to appear to those who study into the history of our
+earlier civilization that the term "law" is a very wide and lax and
+relative one, and one extremely difficult of exact application.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XII
+
+Wild Bill Hickok--_The Beau Ideal of the Western Bad Man; Chivalric,
+Daring, Generous, and Game_--_A Type of the Early Western Frontier
+Officer_.
+
+
+As has been shown in preceding chapters, the Western plains were passed
+over and left unsettled until the advent of the railroads, which began
+to cross the plains coincident with the arrival of the great cattle
+herds which came up from the South after a market. This market did not
+wait for the completion of the railroads, but met the railroads more
+than half way; indeed, followed them quite across the plains. The
+frontier sheriff now came upon the Western stage as he had never done
+before. The bad man also sprang into sudden popular recognition, the
+more so because he was now accessible to view and within reach of the
+tourist and tenderfoot investigator of the Western fauna. These were
+palmy days for the wild West.
+
+Unless it be a placer camp in the mountains, there is no harder
+collection of human beings to be found than that which gathers in tents
+and shanties at a temporary railway terminus of the frontier. Yet such
+were all the capitals of civilization in the earliest days. One town was
+like another. The history of Wichita and Newton and Fort Dodge was the
+history of Abilene and Ellsworth and Hays City and all the towns at the
+head of the advancing rails. The bad men and women of one moved on to
+the next, just as they did in the stampedes of placer days.
+
+To recount the history of one after another of these wild towns would be
+endless and perhaps wearisome. But this history has one peculiar feature
+not yet noted in our investigations. All these cow camps meant to be
+real towns some day. They meant to take the social compact. There came
+to each of these camps men bent upon making homes, and these men began
+to establish a law and order spirit and to set up a government. Indeed,
+the regular system of American government was there as soon as the
+railroad was there, and this law was strong on its legislative and
+executive sides. The frontier sheriff or town marshal was there, the man
+for the place, as bold and hardy as the bold and hardy men he was to
+meet and subdue, as skilled with weapons, as willing to die; and upheld,
+moreover, with that sense of duty and of moral courage which is granted
+even to the most courageous of men when he feels that he has the
+sentiment of the majority of good people at his back.
+
+To describe the life of one Western town marshal, himself the best and
+most picturesque of them all, is to cover all this field sufficiently.
+There is but one man who can thus be chosen, and that is Wild Bill
+Hickok, better known for a generation as "Wild Bill," and properly
+accorded an honorable place in American history.
+
+The real name of Wild Bill was James Butler Hickok, and he was born in
+May, 1837, in La Salle county, Illinois. This brought his youth into the
+days of Western exploration and conquest, and the boy read of Carson and
+Fr�mont, then popular idols, with the result that he proposed a life of
+adventure for himself. He was eighteen years of age when he first saw
+the West as a fighting man under Jim Lane, of Free Soil fame, in the
+guerrilla days of Kansas before the civil war. He made his mark, and
+was elected a constable in that dangerous country before he was twenty
+years of age. He was then a tall, "gangling" youth, six feet one in
+height, with yellow hair and blue eyes. He later developed into as
+splendid looking a man as ever trod on leather, muscular and agile as he
+was powerful and enduring. His features were clean-cut and expressive,
+his carriage erect and dignified, and no one ever looked less the
+conventional part of the bad man assigned in popular imagination. He was
+not a quarrelsome man, although a dangerous one, and his voice was low
+and even, showing a nervous system like that of Daniel Boone--"not
+agitated." It might have been supposed that he would be a natural master
+of weapons, and such was the case. The use of rifle and revolver was
+born in him, and perhaps no man of the frontier ever surpassed him in
+quick and accurate use of the heavy six-shooter. The religion of the
+frontier was not to miss, and rarely ever did he shoot except he knew
+that he would not miss. The tale of his killings in single combat is the
+longest authentically assigned to any man in American history.
+
+After many experiences with the pro-slavery folk from the border, Bill,
+or "Shanghai Bill," as he was then known--a nickname which clung for
+years--went stage driving for the Overland, and incidentally did some
+effective Indian fighting for his employers, finally, in the year 1861,
+settling down as station agent for the Overland at Rock Creek station,
+about fifty miles west of Topeka. He was really there as guard for the
+horse band, for all that region was full of horse thieves and
+cutthroats, and robberies and killings were common enough. It was here
+that there occurred his greatest fight, the greatest fight of one man
+against odds at close range that is mentioned in any history of any part
+of the world. There was never a battle like it known, nor is the West
+apt again to produce one matching it.
+
+The borderland of Kansas was at that time, as may be remembered, ground
+debated by the anti-slavery and pro-slavery factions, who still waged
+bitter war against one another, killing, burning, and pillaging without
+mercy. The civil war was then raging, and Confederates from Missouri
+were frequent visitors in eastern Kansas under one pretext or another,
+of which horse lifting was the one most common, it being held legitimate
+to prey upon the enemy as opportunity offered. Two border outlaws by
+the name of the McCandlas boys led a gang of hard men in enterprises of
+this nature, and these intended to run off the stage company's horses
+when they found they could not seduce Bill to join their number. He told
+them to come and take the horses if they could; and on the afternoon of
+December 16, 1861, ten of them, led by the McCandlas brothers, rode up
+to his dugout to do so. Bill was alone, his stableman being away
+hunting. He retreated to the dark interior of his dugout and got ready
+his weapons, a rifle, two six-shooters, and a knife.
+
+The assailants proceeded to batter in the door with a log, and as it
+fell in, Jim McCandlas, who must have been a brave man to undertake so
+foolhardy a thing against a man already known as a killer, sprang in at
+the opening. He, of course, was killed at once. This exhausted the
+rifle, and Bill picked up the six-shooters from the table and in three
+quick shots killed three more of the gang as they rushed in at the door.
+Four men were dead in less than that many seconds; but there were still
+six others left, all inside the dugout now, and all firing at him at a
+range of three feet. It was almost a miracle that, under such
+surroundings, the man was not killed. Bill now was crowded too much
+to use his firearms, and took to the bowie, thrusting at one man and
+another as best he might. It is known among knife-fighters that a man
+will stand up under a lot of flesh-cutting and blood-letting until the
+blade strikes a bone. Then he seems to drop quickly if it be a deep and
+severe thrust. In this chance medley, the knife wounds inflicted on each
+other by Bill and his swarming foes did not at first drop their men; so
+that it must have been several minutes that all seven of them were mixed
+in a mass of shooting, thrusting, panting, and gasping humanity. Then
+Jack McCandlas swung his rifle barrel and struck Bill over the head,
+springing upon him with his knife as well. Bill got his hand on a
+six-shooter and killed him just as he would have struck. After that no
+one knows what happened, not even Bill himself, who got his name then
+and there. "I just got sort of wild," he said, describing it. "I thought
+my heart was on fire. I went out to the pump then to get a drink, and I
+was all cut and shot to pieces."
+
+[Illustration: From a painting by John W. Norton
+WILD BILL HICKOK'S DESPERATE FIGHT IN THE DUGOUT--ONE MAN AGAINST TEN]
+
+They called him Wild Bill after that, and he had earned the name. There
+were six dead men on the floor of the dugout. He had fairly whipped the
+ten of them, and the four remaining had enough and fled from that awful
+hole in the ground. Two of these were badly wounded. Bill followed them
+to the door. His own weapons were exhausted or not at hand by this time,
+but his stableman came up just then with a rifle in his hands. Bill
+caught it from him, and, cut up as he was, fired and killed one of the
+wounded desperadoes as he tried to mount his horse. The other wounded
+man later died of his wounds. Eight men were killed by the one. The two
+who got to their horses and escaped were perhaps never in the dugout at
+all, for it was hardly large enough to hold another man had any wanted
+to get in.
+
+There is no record of any fighting man to equal this. It took Bill a
+year to recover from his wounds. The life of the open air and hard work
+brought many Western men through injuries which would be fatal in the
+States. The pure air of the plains had much to do with this. Bill now
+took service as wagon-master under General Fr�mont and managed to get
+attacked by a force of Confederates while on his way to Sedalia, the war
+being now in full swing. He fled and was pursued; but, shooting back
+with six-shooters, killed four men. It will be seen that he had now in
+single fight killed twelve men, and he was very young. This tally did
+not cover Indians, of whom he had slain several. Although he did not
+enlist, he went into the army as an independent sharpshooter, just
+because the fighting was good, and his work at this was very deadly. In
+four hours at the Pea Ridge battle, where he lay behind a log, on a hill
+commanding the flat where the Confederates were formed, he is said to
+have killed thirty-five men, one of them the Confederate General
+McCullough. It was like shooting buffalo for him. He was charged by a
+company of the enemy, but was rescued by his own men.
+
+Not yet enlisting, Bill went in as a spy for General Curtis, and took
+the dangerous work of going into "Pap" Price's lines, among the
+touch-and-go Missourians and Arkansans, in search of information useful
+to the Union forces. Bill enlisted for business purposes in a company of
+Price's mounted rangers, got the knowledge desired, and fled, killing a
+Confederate sergeant by name of Lawson in his escape. Curtis sent him
+back again, this time into the forces of Kirby Smith, then in Texas, but
+reported soon to move up into Arkansas. Bill enlisted again, and again
+showed his skill in the saddle, killing two men as he fled. Count up all
+his known victims to this time, and the tally would be at least
+sixty-two men; and Bill was then but twenty-five.
+
+A third time Curtis sent Bill back into the Confederate lines, this time
+into another part of Price's army. Here he was detected and arrested as
+a spy. Bound hand and foot in his death watch, he killed his captor
+after he had torn his hands free, and once more escaped. After that, he
+dared not go back again, for he was too well known and too difficult to
+disguise. He could not keep out of the fighting, however, and went as a
+scout and free lance with General Davis, during Price's second invasion
+of Missouri. He was not an enlisted man, and seems to have done pretty
+much as he liked. One day he rode out on his own hook, and was stopped
+by three men, who ordered him to halt and dismount. All three men had
+their hands on their revolvers; but, to show the difference between
+average men and a specialist, Bill killed two of them and fatally shot
+the other before they could get into action. His tally was now sixty-six
+men at least.
+
+Curtis now sent Bill out into Kansas to look into a report that some
+Indians were about to join the Confederate forces. Bill got the news,
+and also engaged in a knife duel with the Sioux, Conquering Bear, whom
+he accused of trying to ambush him. It was a fair and desperate fight,
+with knives, and although Bill finally killed his man, he himself was so
+badly cut up that he came near dying, his arm being ripped from shoulder
+to elbow, a wound which it took years to mend. It is doubtful if any man
+ever survived such injuries as he did, for by this time he was a mass of
+scars from pistol and knife wounds. He had probably been in danger of
+his life more than a hundred times in personal difficulties; for the man
+with a reputation as a bad man has a reputation which needs continual
+defending.
+
+After the war, Bill lived from hand to mouth, like most frontier
+dwellers. It was at Springfield, Missouri, that another duel of his long
+list occurred, in which he killed Dave Tutt, a fine pistol shot and a
+man with social ambitions in badness. It was a fair fight in the town
+square by appointment. Bill killed his man and wheeled so quickly on
+Tutt's followers that Tutt had not had time to fall before Bill's
+six-shooter was turned the opposite way, and he was asking Tutt's
+friends if they wanted any of it themselves. They did not. This fight
+was forced on Bill, and his quiet attempts to avoid it and his stern way
+of accepting it, when inevitable, won him high estimation on the border.
+Indeed, he was now known all over the country, and his like has not
+since been seen. He was still a splendid looking man, and as cool and
+quiet and modest as ever he had been.
+
+Bill now went to trapping in the less settled parts of Nebraska, and for
+a while he lived in peace, until he fell into a saloon row over some
+trivial matter and invited four of his opponents outside to fight him
+with pistols; the four were to fire at the word, and Bill to do the
+same--his pistol against their four. In this fight he killed one man at
+first fire, but he himself was shot through the shoulder and disabled in
+his right arm. He killed two more with his left hand and badly wounded
+the other. This was a fair fight also, and the only wonder is he was not
+killed; but he seemed never to consider odds, and literally he knew
+nothing but fight.
+
+His score was now seventy-two men, not counting Indians. He himself
+never reported how many Indians he and Buffalo Bill killed as scouts in
+the Black Kettle campaign under Carr and Primrose, but the killing of
+Black Kettle himself was sometimes attributed to Wild Bill. The latter
+was badly wounded in the thigh with a lance, and it took a long time for
+this wound to heal. To give this hurt and others better opportunity for
+mending, Bill now took a trip back East to his home in Illinois. While
+East he found that he had a reputation, and he undertook to use it. He
+found no way of making a living, however, and he returned to the West,
+where he could better market his qualifications.
+
+At that time Hays City, Kansas, was one of the hardest towns on the
+frontier. It had more than a hundred gambling dives and saloons to its
+two thousand population, and murder was an ordinary thing. Hays needed a
+town marshal, and one who could shoot. Wild Bill was unanimously
+selected, and in six weeks he was obliged to kill Jack Strawhan for
+trying to shoot him. This he did by reason of his superior quickness
+with the six-shooter, for Strawhan was drawing first. Another bad man,
+Mulvey, started to run Hays, in whose peace and dignity Bill now felt a
+personal ownership. Covered by Mulvey's two revolvers, Bill found room
+for the lightning flash of time, which is all that is needed by the
+real revolver genius, and killed Mulvey on the spot. His tally was now
+seventy-five men. He made it seventy-eight in a fight with a bunch of
+private soldiers, who called him a "long-hair"--a term very accurate, by
+the way, for Bill was proud of his long, blond hair, as was General
+Custer and many another man of the West at that time. In this fight,
+Bill was struck by seven pistol balls and barely escaped alive by flight
+to a ranch on the prairie near by. He lay there three weeks, while
+General Phil Sheridan had details out with orders to get him dead or
+alive. He later escaped in a box-car to another town, and his days as
+marshal of Hays were over.
+
+Bill now tried his hand at Wild West theatricals, seeing that already
+many Easterners were "daffy," as he called it, about the West; but he
+failed at this, and went back once more to the plains where he belonged.
+He was chosen marshal of Abilene, then the cow camp par excellence of
+the middle plains, and as tough a community as Hays had been.
+
+The wild men from the lower plains, fighting men, mad from whiskey and
+contact with the settlements' possibilities of long-denied indulgence,
+swarmed in the streets and dives, mingling with desperadoes and toughs
+from all parts of the frontier. Those who have never lived in such a
+community will never be able by any description to understand its
+phenomena. It seems almost unbelievable that sober, steady-going America
+ever knew such days; but there they were, and not so long ago, for this
+was only 1870.
+
+Two days after Bill was elected marshal of Abilene, he killed a
+desperado who was "whooping-up" the town in customary fashion. That same
+night, he was on the street, in a dim light, when all at once he saw a
+man whisk around a corner, and saw something shine, as he thought, with
+the gleam of a weapon. As showing how quick were the hand and eye of the
+typical gun-man of the day, it may be stated that Bill killed this man
+in a flash, only to find later that it was a friend, and one of his own
+deputies. The man was only pulling a handkerchief from his pocket. Bill
+knew that he was watched every moment by men who wanted to kill him. He
+had his life in his hands all the time. For instance, he had next to
+kill the friend of the desperado whom he had shot. By this time, Abilene
+respected its new marshal; indeed, was rather proud of him. The reign
+of the bad man of the plains was at its height, and the professional
+man-killer, the specialist with firearms, was a figure here and there
+over wide regions. Among all these none compared with this unique
+specimen. He was generous, too, as he was deadly, for even yet he was
+supporting a McCandlas widow, and he always furnished funerals for his
+corpses. He had one more to furnish soon. Enemies down the range among
+the cow men made up a purse of five thousand dollars, and hired eight
+men to kill the town marshal and bring his heart back South. Bill heard
+of it, and literally made all of them jump off the railroad train where
+he met them. One was killed in the jump. His list of homicides was now
+eighty-one. He had never yet been arrested for murder, and his killing
+was in fair open fight, his life usually against large odds. He was a
+strange favorite of fortune, who seemed certainly to shield him
+round-about.
+
+Bill now went East for another try at theatricals, in which, happily, he
+was unsuccessful, and for which he felt a strong distaste. He was
+scared--on the stage; and when he saw what was expected of him he quit
+and went back once more to the West. He appeared at Cheyenne, in the
+Black Hills, wandering thus from one point to another after the fashion
+of the frontier, where a man did many things and in many places. He had
+a little brush with a band of Indians, and killed four of them with four
+shots from his six-shooter, bringing his list in red and white to
+eighty-five men. He got away alive from the Black Hills with difficulty;
+but in 1876 he was back again at Deadwood, married now, and, one would
+have thought, ready to settle down.
+
+But the life of turbulence ends in turbulence. He who lives by the sword
+dies by the sword. Deadwood was as bad a place as any that could be
+found in the mining regions, and Bill was not an officer here, as he had
+been in Kansas towns. As marshal of Hays and Abilene and United States
+marshal later at Hays City, he had been a national character. He was at
+Deadwood for the time only plain Wild Bill, handsome, quiet, but ready
+for anything.
+
+Ready for anything but treachery! He himself had always fought fair and
+in the open. His men were shot in front. Not such was to be his fate. On
+the day of August 2, 1876, while he was sitting at a game of cards in a
+saloon, a hard citizen by name of Jack McCall slipped up behind him,
+placed a pistol to the back of his head, and shot him dead before he
+knew he had an enemy near. The ball passed through Bill's head and out
+at the cheek, lodging in the arm of a man across the table.
+
+Bill had won a little money from McCall earlier in the day, and won it
+fairly, but the latter had a grudge, and was no doubt one of those
+disgruntled souls who "had it in" for all the rest of the world. He got
+away with the killing at the time, for a miners' court let him go. A few
+days later, he began to boast about his act, seeing what fame was his
+for ending so famous a life; but at Yankton they arrested him, tried him
+before a real court, convicted him, and hanged him promptly.
+
+Wild Bill's body was buried at Deadwood, and his grave, surrounded by a
+neat railing and marked by a monument, long remained one of the features
+of Deadwood. The monument and fence were disfigured by vandals who
+sought some memento of the greatest bad man ever in all likelihood seen
+upon the earth. His tally of eighty-five men seems large, but in fair
+probability it is not large enough. His main encounters are known
+historically. He killed a great many Indians at different times, but of
+these no accurate estimate can be claimed. Nor is his list of victims
+as a sharpshooter in the army legitimately to be added to his record.
+Cutting out all doubtful instances, however, there remains no doubt that
+he killed between twenty and thirty men in personal combat in the open,
+and that never once was he tried in any court on a charge even of
+manslaughter.
+
+This record is not approached by that of any other known bad man. Many
+of them are credited with twenty men, a dozen men, and so forth; but
+when the records are sifted the list dwindles. It is doubted whether any
+other bad man in America ever actually killed twenty men in fair
+personal combat. Bill was not killed in fair fight, nor could McCall
+have hurt him had Bill suspected his intent.
+
+Hickok was about thirty-nine years old when killed, and he had averaged
+a little more than two men for each year of his entire life. He was
+well-known among army officers, and esteemed as a scout and a man, never
+regarded as a tough in any sense. He was a man of singular personal
+beauty. Of him General Custer, soon thereafter to fall a victim himself
+upon the plains, said: "He was a plainsman in every sense of the word,
+yet unlike any other of his class. Whether on foot or on horseback, he
+was one of the most perfect types of physical manhood I ever saw. His
+manner was entirely free from all bluster and bravado. He never spoke of
+himself unless requested to do so. His influence among the frontiersmen
+was unbounded; his word was law. Wild Bill was anything but a
+quarrelsome man, yet none but himself could enumerate the many conflicts
+in which he had been engaged."
+
+These are the words of one fighting man about another, and both men are
+entitled to good rank in the annals of the West. The praise of an army
+general for a man of no rank or wealth leaves us feeling that, after
+all, it was a possible thing for a bad man to be a good man, and worthy
+of respect and admiration, utterly unmingled with maudlin sentiment or
+weak love for the melodramatic.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIII
+
+Frontier Wars--_Armed Conflicts of Bodies of Men on the
+Frontiers_--_Political Wars; Town Site Wars; Cattle Wars_--_Factional
+Fights_.
+
+
+The history of the border wars on the American frontier, where the
+fighting was more like battle than murder, and where the extent of the
+crimes against law became too large for the law ever to undertake any
+settlement, would make a long series of bloody volumes. These wars of
+the frontier were sometimes political, as the Kansas anti-slavery
+warfare; or, again, they were fights over town sites, one armed band
+against another, and both against the law. Wars over cows, as of the
+cattle men against the rustlers and "little fellows," often took on the
+phase of large armed bodies of men meeting in bloody encounter; though
+the bloodiest of these wars are those least known, and the _opera
+bouffe_ wars those most widely advertised.
+
+The state of Kansas, now so calm and peaceful, is difficult to picture
+as the scene of a general bloodshed; yet wherever you scratch Kansas
+history you find a fight. No territory of equal size has had so much war
+over so many different causes. Her story in Indian fighting, gambler
+fighting, outlaw fighting, town site fighting, and political fighting is
+one not approached by any other portion of the West; and if at times it
+was marked with fanaticism or with sordidness, it was none the less
+bitter and notable.
+
+The border wars of Kansas and Missouri at the time immediately preceding
+the civil war would be famed in song and story, had not the greater
+conflict between North and South wiped all that out of memory. Even the
+North was divided over the great question of the repeal of the Missouri
+Compromise. Alabama, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia,
+Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New
+Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and
+Virginia gave a whole or a majority vote for this repeal of the
+Compromise. Against the repeal were Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts,
+New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin.
+Illinois and New Jersey voted a tie vote. Ohio cast four votes for the
+repeal measure, seventeen against it.
+
+This vote brought the territories of Kansas and Nebraska into the Union
+with the option open on whether or not they should have slavery: "it
+being the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate slavery
+into any territory, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people
+thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their own domestic
+institutions in their own way."
+
+That was very well; but who were "the people" of these debated grounds?
+Hundreds of abolitionists of the North thought it their duty to flock to
+Kansas and take up arms. Hundreds of the inhabitants of Missouri thought
+it incumbent upon them to run across the line and vote in Kansas on the
+"domestic institutions"; and to shoot in Kansas and to burn and ravage
+in Kansas. They were met by the anti-slavery legions along the wide
+frontier, and brother slew brother for years, one series of more or less
+ignoble and dastardly outrages following another in big or little,
+murders and arson in big or little, until the whole country at last was
+drawn into this matter of the domestic institutions of "bleeding
+Kansas." The animosities formed in those days were bitter and enduring
+ones, and the more prominent figures on both sides were men marked for
+later slaughter. The civil war and the slavery question were fought out
+all over the West for ten years, even twenty years after the war was
+over. Some large figures came up out of this internecine strife, and
+there were many deeds of courage and many romantic adventures; but on
+the whole, although the result of all this was for the best, and added
+another state to the list unalterably opposed to human slavery, the
+story in detail is not a pleasant one, and adds no great glory to either
+side. It is a chapter of American history which is very well let alone.
+
+When the railroads came across the Western plains, they brought a man
+who has been present on the American frontier ever since the
+revolutionary war,--the land boomer. He was in Kentucky in time to rob
+poor old Daniel Boone of all the lands he thought he owned. He founded
+Marietta, on the Ohio river, on a land steal; and thence, westward, laid
+out one town after another. The early settler who came down the Ohio
+valley in the first and second decades of the past century passed the
+ruins of abandoned towns far back to the east even in that day. The
+town-site shark passed across the Mississippi river and the Missouri,
+and everywhere his record was the same. He was the pioneer of avarice in
+very many cases, and often he inaugurated strife where he purported to
+be establishing law. Each town thought itself the garden spot and center
+of the universe--one knows not how many Kansas towns, for instance,
+contended over the absurd honor of being exactly at the center of the
+United States!--and local pride was such that each citizen must unite
+with others even in arms, if need be, to uphold the merits of his own
+"city."
+
+This peculiar phase of frontier nature usually came most into evidence
+over the questions of county seats. Hardly a frontier county seat was
+ever established without a fight of some kind, and often a bloody one.
+It has chanced that the author has been in and around a few of these
+clashes between rival towns, and he may say that the vehemence of the
+antagonism of such encounters would have been humorous, had it not been
+so deadly. Two "cities," composed each of a few frame shanties and a set
+of blue-print maps, one just as barren of delight as the other, and
+neither worth fighting over at the time, do not seem typical of any
+great moral purpose; yet at times their citizens fought as stubbornly as
+did the men who fought for and against slavery in Kansas. One instance
+of this sort of thing will do, and it is covered in the chapter
+describing the Stevens County War, one of the most desperate and bloody,
+as well as one of the most recent feuds of local politicians.
+
+For some reason, perhaps that of remoteness of time, the wars of the cow
+men of the range seem to have had a bolder, a less sordid and more
+romantic interest, if these terms be allowable. When the cow man began
+to fence up the free range, to shut up God's out-of-doors, he intrenched
+upon more than a local or a political pride. He was now infringing upon
+the great principle of personal freedom. He was throttling the West
+itself, which had always been a land of freedom. One does not know
+whether all one's readers have known it, that unspeakable feeling of
+freedom, of independence, of rebellion at restraint, which came when one
+could ride or drive for days across the empire of the plains and never
+meet a fence to hinder, nor need a road to show the way. To meet one of
+these new far-flung fences of the rich men who began to take up the West
+was at that time only to cut it and ride on. The free men of the West
+would not be fenced in. The range was theirs, so they blindly and
+lovingly thought. Let those blame them who love this day more than that.
+
+But the fence was the sign of the property-owning man; and the
+property-owning man has always beaten the nomad and the restless man at
+last, and set metes and bounds for him to observe. The nesters and
+rustlers fought out the battle for the free range more fiercely than was
+ever generally known.
+
+One of the most widely known of these cow wars was the absurd Johnson
+County War, of Wyoming, which got much newspaper advertising at the
+time--the summer of 1892--and which was always referred to with a
+certain contempt among old-timers as the "dude war." Only two men were
+killed in this war, and the non-resident cattle men who undertook to be
+ultra-Western and do a little vigilante work for themselves among the
+rustlers found that they were not fit for the task. They were very glad
+indeed to get themselves arrested and under cover, more especially in
+the protection of the military. They found that they had not lost any
+rustlers when they stirred up a whole valley full and were themselves
+besieged, surrounded, and well-nigh ready for a general wiping out. They
+killed a couple of "little fellows," or, rather, some of their hired
+Texas cowboys did it for them, but that was all they accomplished,
+except well-nigh to bankrupt Wyoming in the legal muddle, out of which,
+of course, nothing came. There were in this party of cattle men a member
+of the legislature, a member of the stock commission, some two dozen
+wealthy cattle men, two Harvard graduates, and a young Englishman in
+search of adventure. They made, on the whole, about the most
+contemptible and inefficient band of vigilantes that ever went out to
+regulate things, although their deeds were reported by wire to many
+journals, and for a time perhaps they felt that they were cutting quite
+a figure. They had very large property losses to incite them to their
+action, for the rustlers were then pretty much running things in that
+part of Wyoming, and the local courts would not convict them. This
+fiasco scarcely hastened the advent of the day--which came soon enough
+after the railroads and the farmers--under which the home dweller
+outweighed the nomad.[G]
+
+[Footnote G: See "The Story of the Cowboy," by E. Hough. D. Appleton &
+Co.]
+
+Wars between sheep men and cattle men sometimes took on the phase of
+armed bodies of men meeting in bloody encounter. The sheep were always
+unwelcome on the range, and are so to-day, although the courts now
+adjust such matters better than they formerly did. The cow baron and his
+men often took revenge upon the woolly nuisances themselves and killed
+them in numbers. The author knows of one instance where five thousand
+sheep were killed in one box ca�on by irate cow men whose range had been
+invaded. The sheep eat the grass down to the point of killing it, and
+cattle will not feed on a country which sheep have crossed. Many wars of
+this kind have been known all the way from Montana to Mexico.
+
+Again, factional fights might arise over some trivial matter as an
+immediate cause, in a community or a region where numbers of men fairly
+equal were separated in self-interest. In a day when life was still wild
+and free, and when the law was still unknown, these differences of
+opinion sometimes led to bitter and bloody conflicts between factions.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIV
+
+The Lincoln County War--_The Bloodiest, Most Dramatic and Most Romantic
+of all the Border Wars_--_First Authentic Story Ever Printed of the
+Bitterest Feud of the Southwest_.
+
+
+The entire history of the American frontier is one of rebellion against
+the law, if, indeed, that may be called rebellion whose apostles have
+not yet recognized any authority of the law. The frontier antedated
+anarchy. It broke no social compact, for it had never made one. Its
+population asked no protection save that afforded under the stern
+suzerainty of the six-shooter. The anarchy of the frontier, if we may
+call it such, was sometimes little more than self-interest against
+self-interest. This was the true description of the border conflict now
+in question.
+
+The Lincoln County War, fully speaking, embraced three wars; the Pecos
+War of the early '70's, the Harold War of 1874, and the Lincoln County
+War proper, which may be said to have begun in 1874 and to have ended in
+1879. The actors in these different conflicts were all intermingled.
+There was no blood feud at the bottom of this fighting. It was the war
+of self-interest against self-interest, each side supported by numbers
+of fighting men.
+
+At that time Lincoln County, New Mexico, was about as large as the state
+of Pennsylvania. For judicial purposes it was annexed to Donna A�a
+County, and its territories included both the present counties of Eddy
+and Chaves, and part of what is now Donna A�a. It extended west
+practically as far the Rio Grande river, and embraced a tract of
+mountains and high tableland nearly two hundred miles square. Out of
+this mountain chain, to the east and southeast, ran two beautiful
+mountain streams, the Bonito and the Ruidoso, flowing into the Hondo,
+which continues on to the flat valley of the Pecos river--once the
+natural pathway of the Texas cattle herds bound north to Utah and the
+mountain territories, and hence the natural pathway also for many lawful
+or lawless citizens from Texas.
+
+At the close of the civil war, Texas was full of unbranded and unowned
+cattle. Out of the town of Paris, Texas, which was founded by his
+father, came one John Chisum--one of the most typical cow men that ever
+lived. Bold, fearless, shrewd, unscrupulous, genial, magnetic, he was
+the man of all others to occupy a kingdom which had heretofore had no
+ruler.
+
+John Chisum drove the first herds up the Pecos trail to the territorial
+market. He held at one time perhaps eighty thousand head of cattle under
+his brand of the "Long I" and "jinglebob." Moreover, he had powers of
+attorney from a great many cow men in Texas and lower New Mexico,
+authorizing him to take up any trail cattle which he found under their
+respective brands. He carried a tin cylinder, large as a water-spout,
+that contained, some said, more than a thousand of these powers of
+attorney. At least, it is certain he had papers enough to give him a
+wide authority. Chisum riders combed every north-bound herd. If they
+found the cattle of any of his "friends," they were cut out and turned
+on the Chisum range. There were many "little fellows," small cattlemen,
+nested here and there on the flanks of the Chisum herds. What more
+natural than that they should steal from him, in case they found a
+market of their own? That was much easier than raising cows of their
+own. Now, there was a market up this winding Bonito valley, at Lincoln
+and Fort Stanton. The soldiers of the latter post, and the Indians of
+the Mescalero reservation near by, needed supplies. There were others
+besides John Chisum who might need a beef contract now and then, and
+cattle to fill it.
+
+[Illustration: JOHN SIMPSON CHISUM
+A famous cattle king, died December 23, 1884]
+
+At the end of the civil war, there was in New Mexico, with what was
+known as the California Column, which joined the forces of New Mexican
+volunteers, an officer known as Major L. G. Murphy. After the war, a
+great many men settled near the points where they were mustered out in
+the South and West. It was thus with Major Murphy, who located as
+post-trader at the little frontier post known as Fort Stanton, which was
+founded by Captain Frank Stanton in 1854, in the Indian days. John
+Chisum located his Bosque Grande ranch about 1865, and Murphy came to
+Fort Stanton about 1866. In 1875, Chisum dropped down to his South
+Spring River ranch, and by that time Murphy had been thrown out of the
+post-tradership by Major Clendenning, commanding officer, who did not
+like his methods. He had dropped nine miles down the Bonito from Fort
+Stanton, with two young associates, under the firm name of Murphy, Riley
+& Dolan, sometimes spoken of as L. G. Murphy & Co.
+
+Murphy was a hard-drinking man, yet withal something of a student. He
+was intelligent, generous, bold and shrewd. He "staked" every little cow
+man in Lincoln county, including a great many who hung on the flanks of
+John Chisum's herds. These men in turn were in their ethics bound to
+support him and his methods. Murphy was king of the Bonito country.
+Chisum was king of the Pecos; not merchant but cow man, and caring for
+nothing which had not grass and water on it.
+
+Here, then, were two rival kings. Each at times had occasion for a beef
+contract. The result is obvious to anyone who knows the ways of the
+remoter West in earlier days. The times were ripe for trouble. Murphy
+bought stolen beef, and furnished bran instead of flour on his Indian
+contracts, as the government records show. His henchmen held the Chisum
+herds as their legitimate prey. Thus we now have our stage set and
+peopled for the grim drama of a bitter border war.
+
+The Pecos war was mostly an indiscriminate killing among cow men and
+cattle thieves, and it cost many lives, though it had no beginning and
+no end. The Texas men, hard riders and cheerful shooters for the most
+part, came pushing up the Pecos and into the Bonito ca�on. Among these,
+in 1874, were four brothers known as the Harold boys, Bill, Jack, Tom
+and Bob, who had come from Texas in 1872. Two of them located ranches on
+the Ruidoso, being "staked" therein by Major Murphy, king for that part
+of the countryside. The Harold boys once undertook to run the town of
+Lincoln, and a foolish justice ordered a constable to arrest them. One
+Gillam, an ex-sheriff, told the boys to put on their guns. On that night
+there were killed Gillam, Bill Harold, Dave Warner and Martinez, the
+Mexican constable. The dead body of Martinez was lying in the street the
+next morning with a deep cross cut on the forehead. From that time on
+for the next five years, it was no uncommon thing to see dead men lying
+in the streets of Lincoln. The Harold boys had sworn revenge.
+
+There was a little dance in an adobe one night at Lincoln, when Ben
+Harold and some Texas men from the Seven Rivers country rode up. They
+killed four men and one woman that night before they started back to
+Seven Rivers. From that time on, it was Texas against the law, such as
+the latter was. No resident places the number of the victims of the
+Harold war at less than forty or fifty, and it is believed that at least
+seventy-five would be more correct. These killings proved the weakness
+of the law, for none of the Harold gang was ever punished. As for the
+Lincoln County War proper, the magazine was now handsomely laid. Only
+the spark was needed. What would that naturally be? Either an actual law
+court, or else--a woman! In due time, both were forthcoming.
+
+The woman in the case still lives to-day in New Mexico, sometimes spoken
+of as the "Cattle Queen" of New Mexico. She bears now the name of Mrs.
+Susan E. Barber. Her maiden name was Susan E. Hummer, the name sometimes
+spelled Homer, and she was born in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Susan
+Hummer was a granddaughter of Anna Maria Spangler-Stauffer. The Spangler
+family is a noble one of Germany and very old. George Spangler was
+cup-bearer to Godfrey, Chancellor of Frederick Barbarossa, and was with
+the latter on the Crusade when Barbarossa was drowned in the Syrian
+river, Calycadmus, in 1190. The American seat of this old family was in
+York county, Pennsylvania, where the first Spanglers settled in 1731. It
+was from this tenacious and courageous ancestry that there sprang this
+figure of a border warfare in a region wild as Barbarossa's realm
+centuries ago.
+
+On August 23, 1873, in Atchison, Kansas, Susan Hummer was married to
+Alexander A. McSween, a young lawyer fresh from the Washington
+university law school of St. Louis. McSween was born in Charlottetown,
+Prince Edward Island, and was educated in the first place as a
+Presbyterian minister. He was a man of good appearance, of intelligence
+and address, and of rather more polish than the average man. He was an
+orator, a dreamer, and a visionary; a strange, complex character. He was
+not a fighting man, and belonged anywhere in the world rather than on
+the frontier of the bloody Southwest. His health was not good, and he
+resolved to journey to New Mexico. He and his young bride started
+overland, with a good team and conveyance, and reached the little
+_placita_ of Lincoln, in the Bonito ca�on, March 15, 1875. Outside of
+the firm of Murphy, Riley & Dolan, there were at that time but one or
+two other American families. McSween started up in the practice of law.
+
+There appeared in northern New Mexico at about this time an Englishman
+by the name of J. H. Tunstall, newly arrived in the West in search of
+investment. Tunstall was told that there was good open cattle range to
+be had in Lincoln county. He came to Lincoln, met McSween, formed a
+partnership with him in the banking and mercantile business, and,
+moreover, started for himself, and altogether independently, a horse and
+cattle ranch on the Rio Feliz, a day's journey below Lincoln. Now, King
+Murphy, of Lincoln county, found a rival business growing up directly
+under his eyes. He liked this no better than King Chisum liked the
+little cow men on his flanks in the Seven Rivers country. Things were
+ripening still more rapidly for trouble. Presently, the immediate cause
+made its appearance.
+
+There had been a former partner and friend of Major Murphy in the
+post-tradership at Fort Stanton, Colonel Emil Fritz, who established the
+Fritz ranch, a few miles below Lincoln. Colonel Fritz having amassed a
+considerable fortune, concluded to return to Germany. He had insured his
+life in the American Insurance Company for ten thousand dollars, and
+had made a will leaving this policy, or the greater part of it, to his
+sister. The latter had married a clerk at Fort Stanton by the name of
+Scholland, but did not get along well with her husband. Heretofore no
+such thing as divorce had been known in that part of the world; but
+courts and lawyers were now present, and it occurred to Mrs. Scholland
+to have a divorce. She sent to Mr. McSween for legal counsel, and for a
+time lived in the McSween house.
+
+Now came news of the death, in Germany, of Colonel Emil Fritz. His
+brother, Charlie Fritz, undertook to look up the estate. He found the
+will and insurance policy had been left with Major Murphy; but Major
+Murphy, accustomed to running affairs in his own way, refused to give up
+the Emil Fritz will, and forced McSween to get a court order appointing
+Mrs. Scholland administratrix of the Fritz estate. Not even in that
+capacity would Major Murphy deliver to her the will and insurance policy
+when they were demanded, and it is claimed that he destroyed the will.
+Certainly it was never probated. Murphy was accustomed to keep this will
+in a tin can, hid in a hole in the adobe wall of his store building.
+There were no safes at that time and place. The policy had been left as
+security for a loan of nine hundred dollars advanced by a firm known as
+Spiegelberg Brothers. Few ingredients were now lacking for a typical
+melodrama. Meantime the plot thickened by the failure of the insurance
+company!
+
+McSween, in the interest of Mrs. Scholland, now went East to see what
+could be done in the collection of the insurance policy. He was able
+finally, in 1876, to collect the full amount of ten thousand dollars,
+and this he deposited in his own name in a St. Louis bank then owned by
+Colonel Hunter. He had been obliged to pay the Spiegelbergs the face of
+their loan before he could get the policy to take East with him. He
+wished to be secured against this advancement and reimbursed as well for
+his expenses, which, together with his fee, amounted to a considerable
+sum. Moreover, the German Minister enjoined McSween from turning over
+any of this money, as there were other heirs in Germany. Major Murphy
+owed McSween some money. Colonel Fritz also died owing McSween
+thirty-three hundred dollars, fees due on legal work. Yet Murphy
+demanded the full amount of the insurance policy from McSween again and
+again. Murphy, Riley & Dolan now sued out an attachment on McSween's
+property, and levied on the goods in the Tunstall-McSween store. The
+"law" was now doing its work; but there was a very liberal
+interpretation put upon the law's intent. As construed by Sheriff
+William Brady, the writ applied also to the Englishman Tunstall's
+property in cattle and horses on the Rio Feliz ranch; which, of course,
+was high-handed illegality. McSween's statement that he had no interest
+in the Feliz ranch served no purpose. Brady and Murphy were warm
+friends. The lawyer McSween had accused them of being something more
+than that--allies and conspirators. McSween and Tunstall bought Lincoln
+county scrip cheap; but when they presented it to the county treasurer,
+Murphy, it was not paid, and it was charged that he and Brady had made
+away with the county funds. That was never proved, for, as a matter of
+fact, no county books were ever kept! McSween started the first set ever
+known there.
+
+At this time there was working for Tunstall on the Feliz ranch the noted
+desperado, Billy the Kid, who a short time formerly had worked for John
+Chisum. The latter at this stage of the advancing troubles, appears
+rather as a third party, or as holding one point of a triangle, whose
+other two corners were occupied by the Murphy and McSween factions.
+
+Whether or not it was a legal posse which went out to serve the
+attachment on the Tunstall cattle--or whether or not a posse was
+necessary for that purpose--the truth is that a band of men, on February
+13th, 1878, did go out under some semblance of the law and in the
+interests of the Murphy people's claim. Some state that William S.
+Morton, or "Billy" Morton, was chosen by Sheriff Brady as his deputy and
+as leader of this posse. Others name different men as leaders.
+Certainly, the band was suited for any desperate occasion. With it was
+one Tom Hill, who had killed several men at different times, and who had
+been heard to say that he intended to kill Tunstall. There was also
+Jesse Evans, just in from the Rio Grande country, and, unless that were
+Billy the Kid, the most redoubtable fighter in all that country. Evans
+had formerly worked for John Chisum, and had been the friend of Billy
+the Kid; but these two had now become enemies. Others of the party were
+William M. Johnson, Ham Mills, Johnnie Hurley, Frank Baker, several
+ranchers still living in that country, and two or three Mexicans. All
+these rode across the mountains to the Ruidoso valley on their way to
+the Rio Feliz. They met, coming from the Tunstall ranch, Tunstall
+himself in company with his foreman, Dick Brewer, John Middleton and
+Billy the Kid. When the Murphy posse came up with Tunstall, he was
+alone. His men were at the time chasing a flock of wild turkeys along a
+distant hillside. When called upon to halt, Tunstall did so, and then
+came up toward the posse. "You wouldn't hurt me, boys, would you?" he
+said, as he approached leading his horse. When within a few yards, Tom
+Hill said to him, "Why, hello, Tunstall, is that you?" and almost with
+the words fired upon him with his six-shooter and shot him down. Some
+say that Hill shot Tunstall again, and a young Mexican boy called
+Pantilon beat in his skull with a rock. They put Tunstall's hat under
+his head and left him lying there beside his horse, which was also
+killed. His folded coat was found under the horse's head. His body,
+lashed on a burro's back, was brought over the mountains by his friends
+that night into Lincoln, twenty miles distant. Fifty men took up the
+McSween fight that night; for, in truth, the killing of Tunstall was
+murder and without justification.
+
+That was the beginning of the actual Lincoln County War. Dick Brewer,
+Tunstall's foreman, was now leader of the McSween fighting men. McSween,
+of course, supplied him with color of "legal" authority. He was
+appointed "special constable." Neither party had difficulty in obtaining
+all the legal papers required. Each party was presently to have a
+sheriff of its own. Meantime, there was at Lincoln an accommodating
+justice of the peace, John P. Wilson, who was ready to give either
+faction any sort of legal paper it demanded. Dick Brewer, Billy the Kid,
+and nearly a dozen others of the first McSween posse started to the
+lower country, where lived a good many of Murphy's friends, small cow
+men and others. On the Rio Pe�asco, about six miles from the Pecos, they
+came across a party of five men, two of whom, Billy Morton and Frank
+Baker, had been present at the killing of Tunstall. Baker and Morton
+surrendered under promise of safekeeping, and were held for a time at
+Roswell. On the trail from Roswell to Lincoln, at a point near the Agua
+Negra, both these men, while kneeling and pleading for their lives, were
+deliberately shot and killed by Billy the Kid. There was with the
+Brewer posse a buffalo-hunter by the name of McClosky, who had promised
+to take care of these prisoners. Joe McNab, of the posse, shot and
+killed McClosky in cold blood. In this McSween posse were "Doc"
+Skurlock, Charlie Bowdre, Billy the Kid, Hendry Brown, Jim French, John
+Middleton, with McNab, Wait and Smith, besides McClosky, who seems not
+to have been loyal enough to them to sanction cold blooded murder. These
+victims were killed March 7th, 1878.
+
+There had now been deliberate murder committed upon the one side and
+upon the other. There were many men implicated on each side. These men,
+in self-interest, now drew apart together. The factions, of necessity,
+became more firmly established. It may be seen that there was very
+little principle at stake on either side. The country was now simply
+going wild again. It meant to take the law into its own hands; and the
+population was divided into these two factions, to one or the other of
+which every resident must perforce belong. A choice, and sometimes a
+quick one, was an imperative necessity.
+
+The next killing was that of Buckshot Roberts, at Blazer's Mill, near
+the Mescalero Reservation buildings, an affair described in a later
+chapter. Thirteen men, later of the Kid's gang, led by Dick Brewer,
+attacked Roberts, who killed Dick Brewer before he himself died. The
+death of the latter left the Kid chief of the McSween forces.
+
+A great blood lust now possessed all the population. It wanted no law.
+There is no doubt about the intention to make away with Judge Warren
+Bristol of the circuit court. The latter, knowing of these turbulent
+times in Lincoln, decided not to hold court. He sent word to Sheriff
+William Brady to open court and then at once to adjourn it. This was on
+April 1, 1878.
+
+Sheriff Brady, in walking down the street toward the dwelling-house in
+which court sessions were then held, was obliged to pass the McSween
+store and residence. Behind the corral wall, there lay ambushed Billy
+the Kid and at least five others of his gang. Brady was accompanied by
+Billy Matthews (J. B. Matthews, now dead; postmaster of Roswell, New
+Mexico, in 1904), by George Hindman, his deputy, and Dad Peppin, later
+sheriff of Lincoln county. The Kid and his men waited until the victims
+had gone by. Then a volley was fired. Sheriff Brady, shot in the back,
+slowly sank down, his knees weakening under him. "My God! My God! My
+God!" he exclaimed, as he gradually dropped. He had been struck in the
+back by five balls. As he sank down, he turned his head to see his
+murderers, and as he did so received a ball in the eye, and so fell
+dead. George Hindman, the deputy, also shot in the back, ran down the
+street about one hundred and fifty yards before he fell. He lay in the
+street and few dared to go out to him. A saloon-keeper, Ike Stockton
+(himself a bad man, and later killed at Durango, Colorado), offered him
+a drink of water, which he brought in his hat, and Hindman, accepting
+it, fell back dead.
+
+The murder of Sheriff Brady left the country without even the semblance
+of law; but each party now took steps to set up a legal machinery of its
+own, as cover for its own acts. The old justice of the peace, John P.
+Wilson, would issue a warrant on any pretext for any person; but there
+must be some one with authority to serve the process. In a
+quasi-election, the McSween faction instituted John Copeland as their
+sheriff. The Murphy faction held that Copeland never qualified as
+sheriff. He lived with McSween part of the time. It was understood that
+he was sheriff for the purpose of bothering nobody but the Murphy
+people.
+
+Meantime, the other party were not thus to be surpassed. In June, 1878,
+Governor Axtell appointed George W. Peppin as sheriff of Lincoln county.
+Peppin qualified at Mesilla, came back to Lincoln, and demanded of
+Copeland the warrants in his possession. He had, on his part, twelve
+warrants for the arrest of members of the McSween gang. Little lacked
+now to add confusion in this bloody coil. The country was split into two
+factions. Each had a sheriff as a figurehead! What and where was the
+law?
+
+Peppin had to get fighting men to serve his warrants, and he could not
+always be particular about the social standing of his posses. He had a
+thankless and dangerous position as the "Murphy sheriff." Most of his
+posses were recruited from among the small ranchers and cow boys of the
+lower Pecos. Peppin was sheriff only a few months, and threw up the job
+$2,800 in debt.
+
+The men of both parties were now scouting about for each other here and
+there over a district more than a hundred miles square; but presently
+the war was to take on the dignity of a pitched battle. Early in July,
+1878, the Kid and his gang rounded up at the McSween house. There were a
+dozen white desperadoes in their party. There were about forty Mexicans
+also identified with the McSween faction. These were quartered in the
+Montana and Ellis residences, well down the street.
+
+The Murphy forces now surrounded the McSween house, and at once a
+pitched battle began. The McSween men started the firing from the
+windows and loopholes of their fortress. The Peppin men replied. The
+town, divided against itself, held under cover. For three days the two
+little armies lay here, separated by the distance of the street, perhaps
+sixty men in all on the McSween side, perhaps thirty or forty in all on
+the Murphy-Peppin side, of whom nineteen were Americans.
+
+To keep the McSween men inside their fortifications, Peppin had three
+men posted on the mountain side, whence they could look down directly
+upon the top of the houses, as the mountain here rises up sharply back
+of the narrow line of adobe buildings. These pickets were Charlie
+Crawford, Lucillo Montoye, and another Mexican, and with their
+long-range buffalo guns they threw a good many heavy slugs of lead into
+the McSween house. At last, one Fernando Herrera, a McSween Mexican,
+standing in the back door of the Montana house, fired, at a distance of
+about nine hundred yards, at Charlie Crawford. The shot cut Crawford
+down, and he lay, with his back broken, behind a rock on the mountain
+side in the hot sun nearly all day. Crawford was later brought down to
+the street. Medical attendance there was none, and few dared to offer
+sympathy, but Captain Saturnino Baca[H] carried Crawford a drink of
+water.
+
+[Footnote H: Captain Saturnino Baca was a friend of Kit Carson, an
+officer in the New Mexican Volunteers, and the second commanding officer
+of Fort Stanton. He came to Lincoln in 1865, and purchased of J.
+Trujillo the old stone tower, as part of what was then the Baca
+property, near the McSween residence. The Bacas were recognized as
+non-combatants, but were friendly to Major Murphy. Mrs. McSween and Mrs.
+Baca were bitter enemies, and it was commonly said that, as each side
+had a sheriff, each side had a woman. Bonifacio J. Baca, son of Captain
+and Mrs. Baca, was a prot�g� of Major Murphy, who sent him to Notre Dame
+University, Indiana, to be educated. "Bonnie" Baca was at different
+times clerk of the probate court, county assessor, deputy sheriff, etc.,
+and was court interpreter under Judge Warren H. Bristol. He was teaching
+school at the time Sheriff Brady was shot, and from his refuge in the
+"round tower," a few feet distant, saw Brady fall. Captain Baca, wife
+and son, were after that closely watched by the men of the McSween
+faction, but managed to remain neutral and never became involved in the
+fighting, though Billy the Kid more than once threatened to kill young
+Baca.]
+
+The death of Crawford ended the second day's fighting. Peppin's party
+now numbered sixteen men from the Seven Rivers country, or twenty-eight
+in all. The McSween men besieged in the adobe were Billy the Kid, Harvey
+Norris (killed), Tom O'Folliard, Ighenio Salazar (wounded and left for
+dead), Ignacio Gonzales, Jos� Semora (killed), Francisco Romero
+(killed), and Alexander A. McSween, leader of the faction (killed). Doc
+Skurlock, Jack Middleton, and Charlie Bowdre were in the adjoining store
+building.
+
+At about noon of the third day, old Andy Boyle, ex-soldier of the
+British army, said, "We'll have to get a cannon and blow in the doors.
+I'll go up to the fort and steal a cannon." Half-way up to the fort, he
+found his cannon--two Gatling guns and a troop of colored
+cavalry--already on the road to stop what had been reported as firing on
+women and children. The detachment was under charge of the commanding
+officer of Fort Stanton, Colonel Dudley, who marched his men past the
+beleaguered house and drew them up below the place. Colonel Dudley was
+besought by Mrs. McSween, who came out under fire, to save her husband's
+life; but he refused to interfere or take side in the matter, saying
+that the sheriff of the county was there and in charge of his own posse.
+Mrs. McSween refused to accept protection and go up to the post, but
+returned to her husband for what she knew must soon be the end.
+
+McSween, ex-minister, lawyer, honest or dishonest instigator, innocent
+or malicious cause--and one may choose his adjectives in this matter--of
+all these bloody scenes, now sat in the house, his head bowed in his
+hands, the picture of foreboding despair. His nerve was absolutely gone.
+No one paid any attention to him. His wife, the actual leader, was far
+braver than he. The Kid was the commander. "They'd kill us all if we
+surrendered," he said. "We'll shoot it out!"
+
+Old Andy Boyle got some sticks and some coal oil, and, under protection
+of rifles, started a fire against a street door of the house. Jack Long
+and two others also fired the house in the rear. A keg of powder had
+been concealed under the floor. The flames reached this powder, and
+there was an explosion which did more than anything else toward ending
+the siege.
+
+At about dusk, Bob Beckwith, old man Pierce, and one other man, ran
+around toward the rear of the house. Beckwith called out to the inmates
+to surrender. They demanded that the sheriff come for a parley. "I'm a
+deputy sheriff," replied Beckwith. It was dark or nearly so. Several
+figures burst out of the rear door of the burning house, among these the
+unfortunate McSween. Around him, and ahead of him, ran Billy the Kid,
+Skurlock, French, O'Folliard, Bowdre, and a few others. The flashing of
+six-shooters at close range ended the three days' battle. McSween, still
+unarmed, dropped dead. He was found, half sitting, leaning against the
+corral wall. Bob Beckwith, of the Peppin forces, fell almost at the same
+time, killed by Billy the Kid. Near McSween's body lay those of Romero
+and Semora and of Harvey Norris. The latter was a young Kansan, newly
+arrived in that country, of whom little was known.
+
+[Illustration: 1. IGHENIO SALAZAR 2. ALEX. A. McSWEEN 3. CAPT. S. BACA
+(1) Shot and left for dead, in the Lincoln County War. (2) Leader of a
+faction in the Lincoln County War. (3) Friend of Kit Carson; the man who
+carried the news of the big street fight to Ft. Stanton]
+
+With the McSween party, there was one game Mexican, Ighenio Salazar, who
+is alive to-day, by miracle. In the rush from the house, Salazar was
+shot down, being struck by two bullets. He feigned death. Old Andy Boyle
+stood over him with his gun cocked. "I guess he's dead," said Andy. "If
+I thought he wasn't, I shoot him some more." They then jumped on
+Salazar's body to assure themselves. In the darkness, Salazar rolled
+over into a ditch, later made his escape, stopped his wounds with some
+corn husks, and found concealment in a Mexican house until he
+subsequently recovered.
+
+This fight cost McSween his life just at the point when he thought he
+had attained success. Four days before he was killed, he had word from
+the United States Government's commissioner, Angell, that the President
+had deposed Governor Axtell of New Mexico, on account of his appointment
+of Dad Peppin as sheriff, and on charges that Axtell was favoring the
+Murphy faction. General Lew Wallace was now sent out as Governor of New
+Mexico, invested with "extraordinary powers." He needed them. President
+Hayes had issued governmental proclamation calling upon these desperate
+fighting men to lay down their arms, but it was not certain they would
+easily be persuaded. It was a long way to Washington, and a short way to
+a six-shooter.
+
+General Wallace assured Mrs. McSween of protection, but he found there
+was no such thing as getting to the bottom of the Lincoln County War. It
+would have been necessary to hang the entire population of the county to
+execute a formal justice. Almost none of the indictments "stuck," and
+one by one the cases were dismissed. The thing was too big for the law.
+
+The only man ever actually indicted and brought to trial for a killing
+during the Lincoln County War was Billy the Kid, and there is many a
+resident of Lincoln to-day who declares that the Kid was made a
+scapegoat; and many a man even to-day charges Governor Wallace with bad
+faith. Governor Wallace met the Kid by appointment at the Ellis House in
+Lincoln. The Kid came in fully armed, and the old soldier was surprised
+to see in him a bright-faced and pleasant-talking boy. In the presence
+of two witnesses now living, Governor Wallace asked the Kid to come in
+and lay down his arms, and promised to pardon him if he would stand his
+trial and if he should be convicted in the courts. The Kid declined.
+"There is no justice for me in the courts of this country now," said he.
+"I've gone too far." And so he went back with his little gang of
+outlaws, to meet a dramatic end, after further incidents in a singular
+and blood-stained career.
+
+The Lincoln County War now spread wider than even the boundaries of the
+United States. A United States deputy, Wiederman, had been employed by
+the father of the murdered J. H. Tunstall to take care of the Tunstall
+estates and to secure some kind of British revenge for his murder.
+Wiederman falsely persuaded Tunstall _p�re_ that he had helped kill
+Frank Baker and Billy Morton, and Tunstall _p�re_ made him rich,
+Wiederman going to England, where it was safer. The British legation
+took up the matter of Tunstall's death, and the slow-moving governmental
+wheels at Washington began to revolve. A United States indemnity was
+paid for Tunstall's life.
+
+Mrs. McSween, meantime, kept up her work in the local courts. Some time
+after her husband's death, she employed a lawyer by the name of Chapman,
+of Las Vegas, a one-armed man, to undertake the dangerous task of aiding
+her in her work of revenge. By this time, most of the fighters were
+disposed to lay down their arms. The whole society of the country had
+been ruined by the war. Murphy & Co. had long ago mortgaged everything
+they had, and a good many things which they did not have, _e. g._, some
+of John Chisum's cattle, to Tom Catron, of Sante F�. A big peace talk
+was made in the town, and it was agreed that, as there was no longer any
+advantage of a financial nature in keeping up the war, all parties
+concerned might as well quit organized fighting, and engage in
+individual pillage instead. Murphy & Co. were ruined. Murphy and McSween
+were both dead. Chisum could be depended upon to pay some of the debts
+to the warriors through stolen cattle, if not through signed checks.
+Why, then, should good, game men go on killing each other for nothing?
+This was the argument used.
+
+[Illustration: 1. MRS. SATURNINO BACA (In early life) 2. MRS. SUSAN E.
+BARBER 3. MRS. SATURNINO BACA (At sixty)
+The "women in the case" in the Lincoln County War. Mrs. Susan E. Barber
+was known as the "Cattle Queen of the West"]
+
+In this conference there were, on the Murphy side, Jesse Evans, Jimmie
+Dolan and Bill Campbell. On the other side were Billy the Kid, Tom
+O'Folliard and the game Mexican, Salazar. Each of these men had a .45
+Colt at his belt, and a cocked Winchester in his hand. At last, however,
+the six men shook hands. They agreed to end the war. Then, frontier
+fashion, they set off for the nearest saloon.
+
+The Las Vegas lawyer, Chapman, happened to cross the street as these
+desperate fighting men, used to killing, now well drunken, came out, all
+armed, and all swearing friendship.
+
+"Halt, you, there!" cried Bill Campbell to Chapman; and the latter
+paused. "Damn you," said Campbell to Chapman; "you are the ---- ---- of
+a ---- that has come down here to stir up trouble among us fellows.
+We're peaceful. It's all settled, and we're friends now. Now, damn you,
+just to show you're peaceable too, you dance."
+
+"I'm a gentleman," said Chapman, "and I'll dance for no ruffian." An
+instant later, shot through the heart by Campbell's six-shooter, as is
+alleged, he lay dead in the roadway. No one dared disturb his body. He
+was shot at such close range that some papers in his coat pocket took
+fire from the powder flash, and his body was partially consumed as it
+lay there in the road.
+
+For this killing, Jimmie Dolan, Billy Matthews and Bill Campbell were
+indicted and tried. Dolan and Matthews were acquitted. Campbell, in
+default of a better jail, was kept in the guard-house at Fort Stanton.
+One night he disappeared, in company with his guard and some United
+States cavalry horses. Since then nothing has been heard of him. His
+real name was not Campbell, but Ed Richardson.
+
+Billy the Kid did not kill John Chisum, though all the country wondered
+at that fact. There was a story that he forced Chisum to sign a bill of
+sale for eight hundred head of cattle. He claimed that Chisum owed money
+to the McSween fighting men, to whom he had promised salaries which
+were never paid; but no evidence exists that Chisum ever made such a
+promise, although he sometimes sent a wagonload of supplies to the
+McSween fighting men.
+
+John Chisum died of cancer at Eureka Springs, Missouri, December 26,
+1884, and his great holdings as a cattle king afterward became somewhat
+involved. He could once have sold out for $600,000, but later mortgaged
+his holdings for $250,000. He was concerned in a packing plant at Kansas
+City, a business into which he was drawn by others, and of which he knew
+nothing.
+
+Major Murphy died at Sante F� before the big fight at Lincoln. Jimmie
+Dolan died a few years later, and lies buried in the little graveyard
+near the Fritz ranch. Riley, the other member of the firm, went to
+Colorado, and was last heard of at Rocky Ford, where he was prosperous.
+The heritage of hatred was about all that McSween left to his widow, who
+presently married George L. Barber, at Lincoln, and later proved herself
+to be a good business woman--good enough to make a fortune in the cattle
+business from the four hundred head of cattle John Chisum gave her to
+settle a debt he had owed McSween. She afterward established a fine
+ranch near Three Rivers, New Mexico.
+
+Dad Peppin, known as the "Murphy sheriff" by the McSween faction, lived
+out his life on his little holding at the edge of Lincoln _placita_. He
+died in 1905. His rival, John Copeland, died in 1902. The street of
+Lincoln, one of the bloodiest of its size in the world, is silent.
+Another generation is growing up. William Brady, Major Brady's eldest
+son, and Jos�fina Brady-Chavez, a daughter, live in Lincoln; and Bob
+Brady, another son of the murdered sheriff, was long jailer at Lincoln
+jail. The law has arisen over the ruin wrought by lawlessness. It is a
+noteworthy fact that, although the law never punished the participants
+in this border conflict, the lawlessness was never ended by any
+vigilante movement. The fighting was so desperate and prolonged that it
+came to be held as warfare and not as murder. There is no doubt that,
+barring the border fighting of Kansas and Missouri, this was the
+greatest of American border wars.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XV
+
+The Stevens County War--_The Bloodiest County Seat War of the
+West_--_The Personal Narrative of a Man Who Was Shot and Left for
+Dead_--_The Most Expensive United States Court Case Ever Tried_.
+
+
+In the month of May, 1886, the writer was one of a party of
+buffalo-hunters bound for the Neutral Strip and the Panhandle of Texas,
+where a small number of buffalo still remained at that time. We traveled
+across the entire southwestern part of Kansas, below the Santa F�
+railroad, at a time when the great land boom of 1886 and 1887 was at its
+height. Town-site schemes in western Kansas were at that time
+innumerable, and a steady stream of immigration was pouring westward by
+rail and wagon into the high and dry plains of the country, where at
+that time farming remained a doubtful experiment. In the course of our
+travels, we saw one morning, rising before us in the mirage of the
+plains, what seemed to be a series of crenelated turrets, castles peaked
+and bastioned. We knew this was but the mirage, and knew that it must
+have some physical cause. But what was a town doing in that part of the
+world? We drove on and in a few hours found the town--a little, raw boom
+town of unpainted boards and tents, which had sprung up almost overnight
+in that far-off region. The population was that of the typical frontier
+town, and the pronounced belief of all was that this settlement was to
+be the commercial metropolis of the Southwest. This little town was
+later known as Woodsdale, Kansas. It offered then no hint of the bloody
+scenes in which it was soon to figure; but within a few weeks it was so
+deeply embroiled in war with the rival town of Hugoton as to make
+history notable even on that turbulent frontier.
+
+Mr. Herbert M. Tonney, now a prosperous citizen of Flora, Illinois, was
+a resident of that portion of the country in the stirring days of the
+land boom, and became involved to an extent beyond his own seeking in
+this county seat fight. While serving as an officer of the peace, he was
+shot and left for dead. No story can serve so well as his personal
+narrative to convey a clear idea of the causes, methods and results of a
+typical county seat war in the West. His recountal follows:
+
+"I do not need to swear to the truthfulness of my story, for I have
+already done so in many courts and under the cross-examination of some
+of the ablest lawyers in the country. I have repeated the story on the
+stand in a criminal case which cost the United States government more
+money than it has ever expended in any similar trial, unless perhaps
+that having to do with the assassination of President Lincoln. I can say
+that I know what it is to be murdered.
+
+"In March, 1886, I moved out into southwestern Kansas, in what was later
+to be known as Stevens county, then a remote and apparently unattractive
+region. In 1885 a syndicate of citizens of McPherson, Kansas, had been
+formed for the purpose of starting a new town in southwestern Kansas.
+The members were leading bankers, lawyers, and merchants. These sent out
+an exploration party, among which were such men as Colonel C. E. Cook,
+former postmaster of McPherson; his brother, Orrin Cook, a lawyer; John
+Pancoast, J. B. Chamberlain, J. W. Calvert, John Robertson, and others.
+They located a section of school lands, in what was later known as
+Stevens county, as near the center of the proposed county as the range
+of sand dunes along the Cimarron river would permit. Others of the party
+located lands as close to the town site as possible. On August 3, 1886,
+Governor Martin issued a proclamation for the organization of Stevens
+county. It appeared upon the records of the State of Kansas that the new
+county had 2,662 _bona-fide_ inhabitants, of whom 868 were householders.
+These claimed a taxable property, in excess of legal exemptions,
+amounting to $313,035, including railroad property of $140,380. I need
+not state that the organization was wholly based upon fraud. An election
+was called for September 9, and the town of Hugoton--at first called
+Hugo--was chosen.
+
+"There can be competition in the town-site business, however. At Mead
+Center, Kansas, there resided an old-time Kansas man, Colonel S. N.
+Wood, who also wanted a town site in the new county. Wood's partner,
+Captain I. C. Price, went down on July 3 to look over the situation. He
+was not known to the Hugoton men, and he was invited by Calvert, the
+census taker, to register his name as a citizen. He protested that he
+was only a visitor, but was informed that this made no possible
+difference; whereupon, Price proceeded to register his own name, that of
+his partner, those of many of his friends, and many purely imaginary
+persons. He also registered the families of these persons, and
+finally--in a burst of good American humor--went so far as to credit
+certain single men of his acquaintance with large families, including
+twenty or thirty pairs of twins! This cheerful imagination on his part
+caused trouble afterwards; but certain it is that these fictitious
+names, twins and all, went into the sworn records of Hugoton--an unborn
+population of a defunct town, whose own conception was in iniquity!
+
+"Price located a section of government land on the north side of the
+sand hills, eight miles from Hugoton, and this was duly platted for a
+town site. Corner lots were selling at Hugoton for $1,000 apiece, and
+people were flocking to that town. The new town was called Woodsdale,
+and Colonel Wood offered lots free to any who would come and build upon
+them. Settlers now streamed to Woodsdale. Tents, white-topped wagons and
+frail shanties sprung up as though by magic. The Woodsdale boom
+attracted even homesteaders who had cast in their lot with Hugoton. Many
+of these forgot their oaths in the land office, pulled up and filed on
+new quarter sections nearer to Woodsdale. The latter town was jubilant.
+Colonel Wood and Captain Price, in the month of August, held a big
+ratification meeting, taunting the men of Hugoton with those thirty
+pairs of twins that never were on land or sea. A great deal of bad blood
+was engendered at this time.
+
+"Soon after this Wood and Price started together for Garden City. They
+were followed by a band of Hugoton men and captured in a dugout on the
+Cimarron river. Brought back to Hugoton, a mock trial was held upon them
+and they were released on a mock bond, being later taken out of town
+under guard. A report was printed in the Hugoton paper that certain
+gentlemen of that town had gone south with Colonel Wood and Captain
+Price, 'for the purpose of a friendly buffalo hunt.' It was the
+intention to take these two prisoners into the wild and lawless region
+of No Man's Land, or the Panhandle of Texas, there to kill them, and to
+bring back the report that they were accidentally killed in the buffalo
+chase. This strange hunting party did go south, across No Man's Land
+and into the desert region lying around the headwaters of the Beaver.
+The prisoners knew what they were to expect, but, as it chanced, their
+captors did not dare kill them. Meantime, Woodsdale had organized a
+'posse' of twenty-four men, under Captain S. O. Aubrey, the noted
+frontier trailer, formerly an Indian scout. This band, taking up the
+trail below Hugoton, followed and rescued Wood and Price, and took
+prisoners the entire Hugoton 'posse.' The latter were taken to Garden
+City, and here the law was in turn set at defiance by the Woodsdale men,
+the horses, wagons, arms, etc., of the Hugoton party being put up and
+sold in the court to pay the board of the teams, expenses of
+publication, etc. Colonel Wood bought these effects in at public
+auction.
+
+"By this time, Stevens county had been organized and the Hugoton 'pull'
+was in the ascendency. A continuance had been taken at Garden City by
+the Hugoton prisoners, who were charged with kidnapping. The papers in
+this case were sent down from Finney county to the first session of the
+District Court of Stevens county. The result was foregone. Tried by
+their friends, the prisoners were promptly discharged.
+
+"The feeling between the two towns was all the time growing more bitter.
+Cases had been brought against Calvert, the census-taker, for perjury,
+and action was taken looking toward the setting aside of the
+organization of the county. The Kansas legislature, however, now met,
+and the political 'pull' of Hugoton was still strong enough to secure a
+special act legalizing the organization of Stevens county. It was now
+the legislature against the Supreme Court; for a little later the
+Supreme Court declared that the organization had been made through open
+fraud and by means of perjury.
+
+"Naturally, trouble might have been expected at the fall election. There
+were two centers of population, two sets of leaders, two clans,
+separated by only eight miles of sand hills. There could be but one
+county seat and one set of officers. Here Woodsdale began to suffer, for
+her forces were divided among themselves.
+
+"Colonel Wood, the leader of this community, had slated John M. Cross as
+his candidate for sheriff. A rival for the nomination was Sam Robinson,
+who owned the hotel at Woodsdale, and had invested considerable money
+there. Robinson was about forty years of age, and was known to be a bad
+man, credited with two or three killings elsewhere. Wood had always been
+able to flatter him and handle him; but when Cross was declared as the
+nominee for sheriff, Robinson became so embittered that he moved over to
+Hugoton, where he was later chosen town marshal and township constable.
+Hugoton men bought his hotel, leaving Robinson in the position of
+holding real estate in Woodsdale without owning the improvements on it.
+Hence when the town-site commissioners began to issue deeds, Robinson
+was debarred from claiming a deed by reason of the hotel property having
+been sold. Bert Nobel, a friend of Robinson's, sold his drug store and
+moved over with Robinson to Hugoton. Hugoton bought other property of
+Woodsdale malcontents, leaving the buildings standing at Woodsdale and
+taking the citizens to themselves. The Hugoton men put up as their
+candidate one Dalton, and declared him elected. Wood contested the
+election, and finally succeeded in getting his man Cross declared as
+sheriff of Stevens county.
+
+"It was now proposed to issue bonds for a double line of railroad
+across this county, such bonds amounting to eight thousand dollars per
+mile. At this time, the population was largely one of adventurers, and
+there was hardly a foot of deeded land in the entire county. In the
+discussion over this bond election, Robinson got into trouble with the
+new sheriff, in which Robinson was clearly in the wrong, as he had no
+county jurisdiction, being at the time of the altercation outside of his
+own township and town. Later on, a warrant for Robinson's arrest was
+issued and placed in the hands of Ed Short, town marshal of Woodsdale.
+Short was known as a killer, and hence as a fit man to go after
+Robinson.[I] He went to Hugoton to arrest Robinson, and there was a
+shooting affair, in which the citizens of Hugoton protected their man.
+The Woodsdale town marshal, however, still retained his warrant and
+cherished his purpose of arresting his man.
+
+[Footnote I: This man, Ed. Short, later came to a tragic end. A man of
+courage, as has been intimated, he had assisted in the capture of a
+member of the famous Dalton gang, one Dave Bryant, who had robbed a Rock
+Island express train, and was taking him to Wichita, Kansas, to jail. On
+the way Short had occasion to go into the smoker of the train, leaving
+the prisoner in charge of the express messenger, whom Short had
+furnished with a revolver. By some means Bryant became possessed of this
+revolver, held up the messenger, and was in the act of jumping from the
+swiftly moving train, when Short came out of the smoker. Catching sight
+of Short, Bryant fired and struck him, Short returning the fire, and
+both falling from the train together, dead.]
+
+"On July 22 of this year, 1888, Short learned that Sam Robinson, the two
+Cooks, and a man by the name of Donald, together with some women and
+children, had gone on a picnic down in the Neutral Strip, south of the
+Stevens county line. Short raised a 'posse' of four or five men and
+started after Robinson, who was surprised in camp near Goff creek. There
+was a parley, which resulted in Robinson escaping on a fast horse, which
+was tied near the shack where he was stopping with his wife and
+children. Short, meantime, had sent back word to Woodsdale, stating that
+he needed help to take Robinson. Meantime, also, the Hugoton men,
+learning that Short had started down after Robinson, had sent out two
+strong parties to rescue the latter. A battle was imminent.
+
+"It was at this time that I myself appeared upon the scene of this
+turbulent and lawless drama, although, in my own case, I went as a
+somewhat unwilling participant and as a servant of the law, not
+anticipating consequences so grave as those which followed.
+
+"The sheriff of the county, John M. Cross, on receiving the message from
+Short, called for volunteers, which was equivalent to summoning a
+'posse.' He knew there was going to be trouble, and left his money and
+watch behind him, stating that he feared for the result of his errand.
+His 'posse' was made up of Ted Eaton, Bob Hubbard, Rolland Wilcox, and
+myself. At that time I was only a boy, about nineteen years of age.
+
+"We had a long and hard ride to Reed's camp, on Goff creek, whence Short
+had sent up his message. Arriving there, we found Reed, who was catching
+wild horses, together with a man by the name of Patterson and another
+man, but Short was not in sight. From Reed we learned that Robinson had
+gotten away from Short, who had started back, leaving word for Mr.
+Cross, should he arrive, to return home. A band of men from Hugoton, we
+learned later, had overtaken Short and his men and chased them for
+twenty-five miles, but the latter reached Springfield, Seward county,
+unharmed.
+
+"Robinson, who had made his escape to a cow camp and thence to Hugoton
+upon a fresh horse, now met and led down into the Strip one of the first
+Hugoton 'posses.' Among them were Orrin Cook, Charles Cook, J. W.
+Calvert, J. B. Chamberlain, John Jackson, John A. Rutter, Fred Brewer,
+William Clark, and a few others. Robinson was, of course, the leader of
+this band.
+
+"After Sheriff Cross asked me to go down with him to see what had become
+of Ed Short, I went over and got Wilcox and we rode down to the
+settlement of Voorhees. Thence we rode to Goff creek, and all reached
+Reed's camp about seven or eight o'clock on Wednesday morning, July 25,
+1888. Here we remained until about five o'clock of that afternoon, when
+we started for home. Our horses gave out, and we got off and led them
+until well on into the night.
+
+"At about moonrise, we came to a place in the Neutral Strip known as the
+'Hay Meadows,' where there was a sort of pool of standing water, at
+which settlers cut a kind of coarse hay. There was in camp there, making
+hay, an old man by the name of A. B. Haas, of Voorhees, and with him
+were his sons, C. and Keen Haas, as well as Dave Scott, a Hugoton
+partisan. When we met these people here, we concluded to stop for a
+while. Eaton and Wilcox got into the wagon-box and lay down. My horse
+got loose and I was a few minutes in repicketing him. I had not been
+lying down more than twenty minutes, when we were surprised by the
+Hugoton 'posse' under Robinson. The latter had left the trail, which
+came down from the northeast, and were close upon us. They had evidently
+been watching us during the evening with field-glasses, as they seemed
+to know where we had stopped, and had completely surrounded us before we
+knew of their being near us.
+
+"The first I heard was Cross exclaiming, 'They have got us!' At that
+time there was shooting, and Robinson called out, 'Boys, close in!' He
+called out to Cross, 'Surrender, and hold up your hands!' Our arms were
+mostly against the haystacks. Not one of us fired a shot, or could have
+done so at that moment.
+
+"Sheriff Cross, Hubbard, and myself got up and stood together. We held
+up our hands. They did not seem to notice Wilcox and Eaton, who were
+lying in the wagon. Robinson called out to Cross, 'Give up your arms!'
+
+"'I have no arms,' replied Cross. He explained that his Winchester was
+on his saddle and that he had no revolver.
+
+"'I know better than that,' said Robinson. 'Search him!' Some one of the
+Hugoton party then went over Cross after weapons, and told Robinson that
+he had no arms.
+
+"'I know better,' reiterated Robinson. The others stood free at that
+moment, and Robinson exclaimed, 'Sheriff Cross, you are my first man.'
+He raised his Winchester and fired at Cross, a distance of a few feet,
+and I saw Cross fall dead at my side. It was all a sort of trance or
+dream to me. I did not seem to realize what was going on, but knew that
+I could make no resistance. My gun was not within reach. I knew that I,
+too, would be shot down.
+
+[Illustration: THE McSWEEN STORE AND BANK; PROMINENT IN THE LINCOLN
+COUNTY WAR]
+
+"Hubbard had now been disarmed, if indeed he had on any weapon. Robinson
+remarked to him, 'I want you, too!' and as he spoke he raised his
+Winchester and shot him dead, Hubbard also falling close to where I
+stood, his murderer being but a few feet from him.
+
+"I knew that my turn must come pretty soon. It was Chamberlain who was
+to be my executioner, J. B. Chamberlain, chairman of the board of county
+commissioners of Stevens county, and always prominent in Hugoton
+matters. Chamberlain was about eight feet from me, or perhaps less, when
+he raised his rifle deliberately to kill me. There were powder burns on
+my neck and face from the shot, as the woman who cared for me on the
+following day testified in court.
+
+"I saw the rifle leveled, and realized that I was going to be killed.
+Instinctively, I flinched to one side of the line of the rifle. That
+saved my life. The ball entered the left side of my neck, about
+three-quarters of an inch from the carotid artery and about half an inch
+above the left clavicle, coming out through the left shoulder. I felt no
+pain at the time, and, indeed, did not feel pain until the next day. The
+shock of the shot knocked me down and numbed me, and I suppose I lay a
+minute or two before I recovered sensation or knew anything about my
+condition. It was supposed by all that I was killed, and, in a vague
+way, I agreed that I must be killed; that my spirit was simply present
+listening and seeing.
+
+"Eaton had now got out of the wagon, and he started to run towards the
+horses. Robinson and one or two others now turned and pursued him, and I
+heard a shot or so. Robinson came back and I heard him say, 'I have shot
+the ---- ---- ---- who drew a gun on me!'
+
+"Then I heard the Hugoton men talking and declaring that they must have
+the fifth man of our party, whom they had not yet found. At this time,
+old man Haas and his sons came and stood near where I was and saw me
+looking up. The former, seeing that I was not dead, asked me where I
+had been shot. 'They have shot my arm off,' I answered him. At this
+moment I heard the Hugoton men starting toward me, and I dropped back
+and feigned death. Haas did not betray me. The Hugoton men now lit
+matches and peered into the faces of their victims to see if they were
+dead. I kept my eyes shut when the matches were held to my face, and
+held my breath.
+
+"They finally found Wilcox, I do not know just where, but they stood him
+up within fifteen feet of where I was lying feigning death. They asked
+Wilcox what he had been doing there, and he replied that he had just
+been down on the Strip looking around.
+
+"'That's a damned lie!' replied Robinson, the head executioner. As he
+spoke, he raised his Winchester and fired. Wilcox fell, and as he lay he
+moaned a little bit, as I heard:
+
+"'Put the fellow out of his misery,' remarked Robinson, carelessly. Some
+one then apparently fired a revolver shot and Wilcox became silent.
+
+"Some one came to me, took hold of my foot, and began to pull me around
+to see whether I was dead. Robinson wanted it made sure. Chamberlain, my
+executioner, said, 'He's dead; I gave him a center shot. I don't need
+shoot a man twice at that distance.' Either Chamberlain or some one else
+took me by the legs, dragged me about, and kicked me in the side,
+leaving bruises which were visible for many days afterwards. I feigned
+death so well that they did not shoot me again. They did shoot a second
+time each of the others who lay near me. We found seven cartridges on
+the ground near where the killing was done. Eaton was shot at a little
+distance from us, and I do not know whether he was shot more than once
+or not.
+
+"The haymakers were now in trouble, and said that they could not go on
+putting up their hay with the corpses lying around. Robinson told them
+to hitch up and follow the Hugoton party away. They did this, and after
+a while I was left lying there in the half-moonlight, with the dead
+bodies of my friends for company.
+
+"After the party had been gone about twenty minutes, I found I could get
+on my feet, although I was very weak. At first, I went and examined
+Wilcox, Cross, and Hubbard, and found they were quite dead. Their belts
+and guns were gone. Then I went to get my horse. It was hard for me to
+get into the saddle, and it has always seemed to me providential that I
+could do so at all. My horse was very wild and difficult to mount under
+ordinary circumstances. Now, it seemed to me that he knew my plight. It
+is certain that at that time and afterwards he was perfectly quiet and
+gentle, even when I laboriously tried to get into the saddle.
+
+"At a little distance, there was a buffalo wallow, with some filthy
+water in it. I led my horse here, lay down in the water, and drank a
+little of it. After that I rode about fifteen or sixteen miles along a
+trail, not fully knowing where I was going. In the morning, I met
+constable Herman Cann, of Voorhees, who had been told by the Haas party
+of the foregoing facts. Of course, we might expect a Hugoton 'posse' at
+any time. As a matter of fact, the same crowd who did the killing
+(fifteen of them, as I afterwards learned), after taking the haymakers
+back toward the State of Kansas, returned on their hunt for one of
+Short's men, who they supposed was still in that locality. It was
+probably not later than one or two o'clock in the morning when they
+found me gone.
+
+"Our butchers now again sat down on the ground near the bodies of their
+victims, and they seem to have enjoyed themselves. There was talk that
+some beer bottles were emptied and left near the heads of their victims
+as markers, but whether this was deliberately done I cannot say.
+
+"Constable Cann later hid me in the middle of a cornfield. This, no
+doubt, saved my life, for the Hugoton scouts were soon down there the
+next morning, having discovered that one of the victims had come to
+life. Woodsdale had sent out two wagons with ice to bring in the bodies
+of the dead men, but these Hugoton scouts met them and made them ride
+through Hugoton, so that the assembled citizens of that town might see
+the corpses. The county attorney, William O'Connor, made a speech,
+demanding that Hugoton march on Woodsdale and kill Wood and Ed Short.
+
+"By this time, of course, all Woodsdale was also under arms. My friends
+gathered from all over the countryside, a large body of them, heavily
+armed. Mr. Cann, the constable, had tried to take me to Liberal, but I
+could not stand the ride. I was then taken to the house of a doctor in
+the settlement at LaFayette. On the second night after the massacre I
+was taken to Woodsdale by about twenty of the Woodsdale boys, who came
+after me. We arrived at Woodsdale about daybreak next morning. In our
+night trip we could see the skyrocket signals used by the Robinson-Cook
+gang.
+
+"After my arrival at Woodsdale, it might have been supposed that all the
+country was in a state of war, instead of living in a time of modern
+civilization. Entrenchments were thrown up, rifle pits were dug, and
+stands established for sharp-shooters. Guards were thrown out all around
+the town, and mounted scouts continued to scour the country. Hugoton,
+expecting that Woodsdale would make an organized attack in retaliation,
+was quite as fully fortified in every way. Had there been a determined
+leader, the bloodshed would have been much greater. Of course, the
+result of this state of hostilities was that the governor sent out the
+militia, and there were investigations, and, later on, arrests and
+trials. The two towns literally fought each other to the death.
+
+"The murder of Sheriff Cross occurred in 1888. The militia were
+withdrawn within about thirty days thereafter. Both towns continued to
+break the law--in short, agreed jointly to break the law. They drew up
+a stipulation, it is said, under which Colonel Wood was to have all the
+charges against the Hugoton men dismissed. In return, Wood was to have
+all the charges against him in Hugoton dismissed, and was to have safe
+conduct when he came up to court. Not even this compounding of felony
+was kept as a pact between these treacherous communities.
+
+"The trial lagged. Wood was once more under bond to appear at Hugoton,
+before the court of his enemy, Judge Botkin, and among many other of his
+Hugoton enemies. On the day that Colonel Wood was to go for his trial,
+June 23, 1891, he drove up in a buggy. In the vehicle with him were his
+wife and a Mrs. Perry Carpenter. Court was held in the Methodist church.
+At the time of Wood's arrival, the docket had been called and a number
+of cases set for trial, including one against Wood for arson--there was
+no crime in the calendar of which one town did not accuse the other,
+and, indeed, of which the citizens of either were not guilty.
+
+"Wood left the two ladies sitting in the buggy, near the door, and
+stepped up to the clerk's desk to look over some papers. As he went in,
+he passed, leaning against the door, one Jim Brennan, a deputy of
+Hugoton, who did not seem to notice him. Brennan was a friend of C. E.
+Cook, then under conviction for the Hay Meadows massacre. Brennan stood
+talking to Mrs. Wood and Mrs. Carpenter, smiling and apparently
+pleasant. Colonel Wood turned and came down towards the door, again
+passing close to Brennan but not speaking to him. He was almost upon the
+point of climbing to his seat in the buggy, when Brennan, without a word
+and without any sort of warning, drew a revolver and shot him in the
+back. Wood wheeled around, and Brennan shot him the second time, through
+the right side. Not a word had been spoken by any one. Wood now started
+to run around the corner of the house. His wife, realizing now what was
+happening, sprang from the buggy-seat and followed to protect him.
+Brennan fired a third time, but missed. Mrs. Wood, reaching her
+husband's side, threw her arms around his neck. Brennan coming close up,
+fired a fourth shot, this time through Wood's head. The murdered man
+fell heavily, literally in his wife's arms, and for the moment it was
+thought both were killed. Brennan drew a second revolver, and so stood
+over Wood's corpse, refusing to surrender to any one but the sheriff of
+Morton county.
+
+"The presiding judge at this trial was Theodosius Botkin, a figure of
+peculiar eminence in Kansas at that time. Botkin gave Brennan into the
+custody of the sheriff of Morton county. He was removed from the county,
+and it need hardly be stated that when he was at last brought back for
+trial it was found impossible to empanel a jury, and he was set free. No
+one was ever punished for this cold-blooded murder.
+
+"Colonel S. N. Wood was an Ohio man, but moved to Kansas in the early
+Free Soil days. He was a friend and champion of old John Brown and a
+colonel of volunteers in the civil war. He had served in the legislature
+of Kansas, and was a good type of the early and adventurous pioneer.
+
+"Whether or not suspicion attached to Judge Botkin for his conduct in
+this matter, he himself seems to have feared revenge, for he held court
+with a Winchester at his hand and a brace of revolvers on the desk in
+front of him, his court-house always surrounded with an armed guard. He
+offended men in Seward county, and there was a plot made to kill him. A
+party lay in wait along the road to intercept Botkin on his journey from
+his homestead--every one in Kansas at that time had a 'claim'--but
+Botkin was warned by some friend. He sent out Sam Dunn, sheriff of
+Seward county, to discover the truth of the rumor. Dunn went on down the
+trail and, in a rough part of the country, was fired upon and killed,
+instead of Botkin. Arrests were made in this matter also, but the sham
+trials resulted much as had that of Brennan. The records of these trials
+may be seen in Seward county. It was murder for murder, anarchy for
+anarchy, evasion for evasion, in this portion of the frontier. Judge
+Botkin soon after this resigned his seat upon the bench and went to
+lecturing upon the virtues of the Keeley cure. Afterwards he went to the
+legislature--the same legislature which had once tried him on charges of
+impeachment as a judge!
+
+"These events all became known in time, and lawlessness proved its own
+inability to endure. The towns were abandoned. Where in 1889 there were
+perhaps 4,000 people, there remained not 100. The best of the farms were
+abandoned or sold for taxes, the late inhabitants of the two warring
+settlements wandering out over the world. The legislature, hoodwinked or
+cajoled heretofore, at length disorganized the county, and anarchy gave
+back its own to the wilderness.
+
+"I have indicated that the trial of the men guilty of assassinating my
+friends and of attempting to kill myself in the Hay Meadow butchery was
+one which reached a considerable importance at the time. The crimes were
+committed in that strange portion of the country called No Man's Land or
+the Neutral Strip. The accused were tried in the United States court at
+Paris, Texas. I myself drew the indictments against them. There were
+tried the Cooks, Chamberlain, Robinson and others of the Hugoton party,
+and of these six were convicted and sentenced to be hung. These men were
+defended by Colonel George R. Peck, later chief counsel of the Chicago,
+Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway. With him were associated Judge John F.
+Dillon, of New York; W. H. Rossington, of St. Louis; Senator Manderson,
+of Nebraska; Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, and others. The Knights of
+Pythias raised a fund to defend the prisoners, and spent perhaps a
+hundred thousand dollars in all in this undertaking. A vast political
+'pull' was exercised at Topeka and Washington. After the sentence had
+been passed, the case was taken up to the United States Supreme Court,
+on the ground that the Texas court had no jurisdiction in the premises,
+and on the further grounds of errors in the trial. The United States
+Supreme Court, in 1891, reversed the Texas court, on an error on the
+admission of evidence, and remanded the cases. The men were never put on
+trial again, except that, in 1898, Sam Robinson, meantime pardoned out
+of the penitentiary in Colorado, where he had been sent for robbing the
+United States mails at Florissant, Colorado, returned to Texas, and was
+arrested on the old charge. The men convicted were C. E. Cook, Orrin
+Cook, Cyrus C. Freese, John Lawrence and John Jackson.
+
+"The Illinois legislature petitioned Congress to extend United States
+jurisdiction over No Man's Land, and so did the state of Indiana; and it
+was attached to the East District of Texas for the purposes of
+jurisdiction. Congressman Springer held up this bill for a time, using
+it as a club for the passage of a measure of his own upon which he was
+intent. Thus, it may be seen that the tawdry little tragedy in that
+land which indeed was 'No Man's Land' in time attained a national
+prominence.
+
+"The collecting of the witnesses for this trial cost the United States
+government over one hundred thousand dollars. The trial was long and
+bitterly fought. It resulted, as did every attempt to convict those
+concerned in the bloody doings of Stevens county, in an absolute failure
+of the ends of justice. Of all the murders committed in that bitter
+fighting, not one murderer has ever been punished! Never was greater
+political or judicial mockery.
+
+"I had the singular experience, once in my life, of eating dinner at the
+same table with the man who brutally shot me down and left me for dead.
+J. B. Chamberlain, the man who shot me, and who thought he had killed
+me, came in with a friend and sat down at the same table in a
+Leavenworth, Kansas, restaurant, where I was eating. My opportunity for
+revenge was there. I did not take it. Chamberlain and his friend did not
+know who I was. I left the matter to the law, with what results the
+records of the law's failure in these matters has shown.
+
+"Of those who were tried for these murders, J. B. Chamberlain is now
+dead. C. E. Cook, who was much alarmed lest the cases might be
+reinstated in the year 1898, claims Quincy, Illinois, as his home, but
+has interests in Florida. O. J. Cook is dead. Jack Lawrence is dead.
+John Kelley is dead. Other actors in the drama, unconvicted, are also
+dead or nameless wanderers. As the indictments were all quashed in 1898,
+Sam Robinson, whose whereabouts is unknown, will never be brought to
+trial for his deeds in the Hay Meadow butchery. He was not tried at
+Paris, being then in the Colorado penitentiary. His friend and partner,
+Bert Nobel, who was sent to the penitentiary for seven years for
+participating in the postoffice robbery, was pardoned out, and later
+killed a policeman at Trinidad, Colorado. He was tried there and hanged.
+So far as I know, this is the only legal punishment ever inflicted upon
+any of the Hugoton or Woodsdale men, who outvied each other in a
+lawlessness for which anarchy would be a mild name."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVI
+
+Biographies of Bad Men--_Desperadoes of the Deserts_--_Billy the Kid,
+Jesse Evans, Joel Fowler, and Others Skilled in the Art of Gun
+Fighting_.
+
+
+The desert regions of the West seemed always to breed truculence and
+touchiness. Some of the most desperate outlaws have been those of
+western Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. These have sometimes been
+Mexicans, sometimes half-breed Indians, very rarely full-blood or
+half-blood negroes. The latter race breeds criminals, but lacks in the
+initiative required in the character of the desperado. Texas and the
+great arid regions west of Texas produced rather more than their full
+quota of bad white men who took naturally to the gun.
+
+By all means the most prominent figure in the general fighting along the
+Southwestern border, which found climax in the Lincoln County War, was
+that historic and somewhat romantic character known as Billy the Kid,
+who had more than a score of killings to his credit at the time of his
+death at the age of twenty-one. His character may not be chosen as an
+exemplar for youth, but he affords an instance hardly to be surpassed of
+the typical bad man.
+
+The true name of Billy the Kid was William H. Bonney, and he was born in
+New York City, November 23, 1859. His father removed to Coffeyville, on
+the border of the Indian Nations, in 1862, where soon after he died,
+leaving a widow and two sons. Mrs. Bonney again moved, this time to
+Colorado, where she married again, her second husband being named
+Antrim. All the time clinging to what was the wild border, these two now
+moved down to Santa F�, New Mexico, where they remained until Billy was
+eight years of age. In 1868, the family made their home at Silver City,
+New Mexico, where they lived until 1871, when Billy was twelve years of
+age. His life until then had been one of shifting about, in poverty or
+at best rude comfort. His mother seems to have been a wholesome
+Irishwoman, of no great education, but of good instincts. Of the boy's
+father nothing is known; and of his stepfather little more, except that
+he was abusive to the stepchildren. Antrim survived his wife, who died
+about 1870. The Kid always said that his stepfather was the cause of his
+"getting off wrong."
+
+The Kid was only twelve years old when, in a saloon row in which a
+friend of his was being beaten, he killed with a pocket-knife a man who
+had previously insulted him. Some say that this was an insult offered to
+his mother; others deny it and say that the man had attempted to
+horsewhip Billy. The boy turned up with a companion at Fort Bowie, Pima
+county, Arizona, and was around the reservation for a while. At last he
+and his associate, who appears to have been as well saturated with
+border doctrine as himself at tender years, stole some horses from a
+band of Apaches, and incidentally killed three of the latter in a night
+attack. They made their first step at easy living in this enterprise,
+and, young as they were, got means in this way to travel about over
+Arizona. They presently turned up at Tucson, where Billy began to employ
+his precocious skill at cards; and where, presently, in the
+inevitable gambler's quarrel, he killed another man. He fled across
+the line now into old Mexico, where, in the state of Sonora, he set up
+as a youthful gambler. Here he killed a gambler, Jos� Martinez, over a
+monte game, on an "even break," being the fraction of a second the
+quicker on the draw. He was already beginning to show his natural
+fitness as a handler of weapons. He kept up his record by appearing next
+at Chihuahua and robbing a few monte dealers there, killing one whom he
+waylaid with a new companion by the name of Segura.
+
+[Illustration: BILLY THE KID
+Said to have slain twenty-two men in his short career. Killed when
+twenty-one years old by Sheriff Pat F. Garrett]
+
+The Kid was now old enough to be dangerous, and his life had been one of
+irresponsibility and lawlessness. He was nearly at his physical growth
+at this time, possibly five feet seven and a half inches in height, and
+weighing a hundred and thirty-five pounds. He was always slight and
+lean, a hard rider all his life, and never old enough to begin to take
+on flesh. His hair was light or light brown, and his eyes blue or
+blue-gray, with curious red hazel spots in them. His face was rather
+long, his chin narrow but long, and his front teeth were a trifle
+prominent. He was always a pleasant mannered youth, hopeful and buoyant,
+never glum or grim, and he nearly always smiled when talking.
+
+The Southwestern border at this time offered but few opportunities for
+making an honest living. There were the mines and there were the cow
+ranches. It was natural that the half-wild life of the cow punchers
+would sooner or later appeal to the Kid. He and Jesse Evans met
+somewhere along the lower border a party of punchers, among whom were
+Billy Morton and Frank Baker, as well as James McDaniels; the last named
+being the man who gave Billy his name of "The Kid," which hung to him
+all his life.
+
+The Kid arrived in the Seven Rivers country on foot. In his course east
+over the mountains from Mesilla to the Pecos valley he had been mixed up
+with a companion, Tom O'Keefe, in a fight with some more Apaches, of
+whom the Kid is reported to have killed one or more. There is no doubt
+that the Guadalupe mountains, which he crossed, were at that time a
+dangerous Indian country. That the Kid worked for a time for John
+Chisum, on his ranch near Roswell, is well known, as is the fact that he
+cherished a grudge against Chisum for years, and was more than once upon
+the point of killing him for a real or fancied grievance. He left
+Chisum and took service with J. H. Tunstall on his Feliz ranch late in
+the winter of 1877, animated by what reason we may not know. In doing
+this, he may have acted from pique or spite or hatred. There was some
+quarrel between him and his late associates. Tunstall was killed by the
+Murphy faction on February 18, 1878. From that time, the path of the Kid
+is very plain and his acts well known and authenticated. He had by this
+time killed several men, certainly at least two white men; and how many
+Mexicans and Indians he had killed by fair means or foul will never be
+really known. His reputation as a gun fighter was well established.
+
+Dick Brewer, Tunstall's foreman, was now sworn in as a "special deputy"
+by McSween, and a war of reprisal was now on. The Kid was soon in the
+saddle with Brewer and after his former friends, all Murphy allies.
+There were about a dozen in this posse. On March 6, 1878, these men
+discovered and captured a band of five men, including Frank Baker and
+Billy Morton, both old friends of the Kid, at the lower crossing of the
+Rio Pe�asco, some six miles from the Pecos. The prisoners were kept
+over night at Chisum's ranch, and then the posse started with them for
+Lincoln, not taking the Hondo-Bonito trail, but one _via_ the Agua
+Negra, on the east side of the Capitans; proof enough that something
+bloody was in contemplation, for that was far from any settlements.
+Apologists of the Kid say that Morton and Baker "tried to escape," and
+that the Kid followed and killed them. The truth in all probability is
+that the party, sullen and bloody-minded, rode on, waiting until wrath
+or whiskey should inflame them so as to give resolution for the act they
+all along intended. The Kid, youngest but most determined of the band,
+no doubt did the killing of Billy Morton and Frank Baker; and in all
+likelihood there is truth in the assertion that they were on their knees
+and begging for their lives when he shot them. McClosky was killed by
+McNab, on the principle that dead men tell no tales. This killing was on
+March 9, 1878. The murder of Sheriff William Brady and George Hindman by
+the Kid and his half-dozen companions occurred April 1, 1878, and it is
+another act which can have no palliation whatever.
+
+The Kid was now assuming prominence as a gun fighter and leader, young
+as he was. After the big fight in Lincoln was over, and the McSween
+house in flames, the Kid was leader of the sortie which took him and a
+few of his companions to safety. The list of killings back of him was
+now steadily lengthening, and, indeed, one murder followed another so
+fast all over that country that it was hard to keep track of them all.
+
+The killing of the Indian agency clerk, Bernstein, August 5, 1878, on a
+horse-stealing expedition, was the next act of the Kid and his men, who
+thereafter fled northeast, out through the Capitan Gap, to certain old
+haunts around Fort Sumner, some ninety miles north of Roswell, up the
+Pecos valley. Here a little band of outlaws, led by the Kid, lived for a
+time as they could by stealing horses along the Bonito and around the
+Capitans, and running them off north and east. There were in this band
+at the time the Kid, Charlie Bowdre, Doc Skurlock, Wayt, Tom O'Folliard,
+Hendry Brown and Jack Middleton. Some or all of these were in the march
+with stolen horses which the Kid engineered that fall, going as far east
+as Atacosa, on the Canadian, before the stock was all gotten rid of.
+Middleton, Wayt, and Hendry Brown there left the Kid's gang, telling him
+that he would get killed before long; but the latter laughed at them
+and returned to his old grounds, alternating between Lincoln and Fort
+Sumner, and now and then stealing some cows from the Chisum herd.
+
+In January, 1880, the Kid enlarged his list of victims by killing, in a
+very justifiable encounter, a bad man from the Panhandle by the name of
+Grant, who had been loafing around in his country, and who, no doubt,
+intended to kill the Kid for the glory of it. The Kid had, a few moments
+before he shot Grant, taken the precaution to set the hammer of the
+latter's revolver on an "empty," as he whirled it over in examination.
+They were apparently friends, but the Kid knew that Grant was drunk and
+bloodthirsty. He shot Grant twice through the throat, as Grant snapped
+his pistol in his face. Nothing was done with the Kid for this, of
+course.
+
+Birds of a feather now began to appear in the neighborhood of Fort
+Sumner, and the Kid's gang was increased by the addition of Tom Pickett,
+and later by Billy Wilson, Dave Rudabaugh, Buck Edwards, and one or two
+others. These men stole cattle now from ranges as far east as the
+Canadian, and sold them to obliging butcher-shops at the new mining
+camp of White Oaks, just coming into prominence; or, again, they took
+cattle from the lower Pecos herds and sold them north at Las Vegas; or
+perhaps they stole horses at the Indian reservation and distributed them
+along the Pecos valley. Their operations covered a country more than two
+hundred miles across in either direction. They had accomplices and
+friends in nearly every little _placita_ of the country. Sometimes they
+gave a man a horse as a present. If he took it, it meant that they could
+depend upon him to keep silent. Partly by friendliness and partly by
+terrorizing, their influence was extended until they became a power in
+all that portion of the country; and their self-confidence had now
+arisen to the point that they thought none dared to molest them, while
+in general they behaved in the high-handed fashion of true border
+bandits. This was the heyday of the Kid's career.
+
+It was on November 27, 1880, that the Kid next added to his list of
+killings. The men of White Oaks, headed by deputy sheriff William
+Hudgens, saloon-keeper of White Oaks, formed a posse, after the fashion
+of the day, and started out after the Kid, who had passed all bounds in
+impudence of late. In this posse were Hudgens and his brother, Johnny
+Hudgens, Jim Watts, John Mosby, Jim Brent, J. P. Langston, Ed. Bonnell,
+W. G. Dorsey, J. W. Bell, J. P. Eaker, Charles Kelly, and Jimmy Carlyle.
+They bayed up the Kid and his gang in the Greathouse ranch, forty miles
+from White Oaks, and laid siege, although the weather was bitterly cold
+and the party had not supplies or blankets for a long stay. Hudgens
+demanded the surrender of the Kid, and the latter said he could not be
+taken alive. Hudgens then sent word for Billy Wilson to come out and
+have a talk. The latter refused, but said he would talk with Jimmy
+Carlyle, if the latter would come into the house. Carlyle, against the
+advice of all, took off his pistol belt and stepped into the house. He
+was kept there for hours. About two o'clock in the afternoon they heard
+the window glass crash and saw Carlyle break through the window and
+start to run. Several shots followed, and Carlyle fell dead, the bullets
+that killed him cutting dust in the faces of Hudgens' men, as they lay
+across the road from the house.
+
+This murder was a nail in the Kid's coffin, for Carlyle was well liked
+at White Oaks. By this time the toils began to tighten in all
+directions. The United States Government had a detective, Azariah F.
+Wild, in Lincoln county. Pat Garrett had now just been elected sheriff,
+and was after the outlaws. Frank Stewart, a cattle detective, with a
+party of several men, was also in from the Canadian country looking for
+the Kid and his gang for thefts committed over to the east of Lincoln
+county, across the lines of Texas and the Neutral Strip. The Kid at this
+time wrote to Captain J. C. Lea, at Roswell, that if the officers would
+leave him alone for a time, until he could get his stuff together, he
+would pull up and leave the country, going to old Mexico, but that if he
+was crowded by Garrett or any one else, he surely would start in and do
+some more killing. This did not deter Garrett, who, with a posse made up
+of Chambers, Barney Mason, Frank Stewart, Juan Roibal, Lee Halls, Jim
+East, "Poker Tom," "Tenderfoot Bob," and "The Animal," with others, all
+more or less game, or at least game enough to go as far as Fort Sumner,
+at length rounded up the Kid, and took him, Billy Wilson, Tom Pickett
+and Dave Rudabaugh; Garrett killing O'Folliard and Bowdre.
+
+Pickett was left at Las Vegas, as there was no United States warrant out
+against him. Rudabaugh was tried later for robbing the United States
+mails, later tried for killing his jailer, and was convicted and
+sentenced to be hung; but once more escaped from the Las Vegas jail and
+got away for good. The Kid was not so fortunate. He was tried at
+Mesilla, before Judge Warren H. Bristol, the same man whose life he was
+charged with attempting in 1879. Judge Bristol appointed Judge Ira E.
+Leonard, of Lincoln, to defend the prisoner, and Leonard got him
+acquitted of the charge of killing Bernstein on the reservation. He was
+next tried, at the same term of court, for the killing of Sheriff
+William Brady, and in March, 1881, he was convicted under this charge
+and sentenced to be hanged at Lincoln on May 13, 1881. He was first
+placed under guard of Deputies Bob Ollinger and Dave Woods, and taken
+across the mountains in the custody of Sheriff Garrett, who received his
+prisoner at Fort Stanton on April 21.
+
+Lincoln county was just beginning to emerge from savagery. There was no
+jail worth the name, and all the county could claim as a place for the
+house of law and order was the big store building lately owned by
+Murphy, Riley & Dolan. It was necessary to keep the Kid under guard for
+the three weeks or so before his execution, and Sheriff Garrett chose as
+the best available material Bob Ollinger and J. W. Bell, a good, quiet
+man from White Oaks, to act as the death watch over this dangerous man,
+who seemed now to be nearly at the end of his day.
+
+Against Bob Ollinger the Kid cherished an undying hatred, and longed to
+kill him. Ollinger hated him as much, and wanted nothing so much as to
+kill the Kid. He was a friend of Bob Beckwith, whom the Kid had killed,
+and the two had always been on the opposite sides of the Lincoln county
+fighting. Ollinger taunted the Kid with his deeds, and showed his own
+hatred in every way. There are many stories about what now took place in
+this old building at the side of bloody little Lincoln street. A common
+report is that in the evening of April 28, 1881, the Kid was left alone
+in the room with Bell, Ollinger having gone across the street for
+supper; that the Kid slipped his hands out of his irons--as he was able
+to do when he liked, his hands being very small--struck Bell over the
+head with his shackles while Bell was reading or was looking out of the
+window, later drawing Bell's revolver from its scabbard and killing him
+with it. This story is not correct. The truth is that Bell took the
+Kid, at his request, into the yard back of the jail; returning, the Kid
+sprang quickly up the stairs to the guard-room door, as Bell turned to
+say something to old man Goss, a cook, who was standing in the yard. The
+Kid pushed open the door, caught up a revolver from a table, and sprang
+to the head of the stairs just as Bell turned the angle and started up.
+He fired at Bell and missed him, the ball striking the left-hand side of
+the staircase. It glanced, however, and passed through Bell's body,
+lodging in the wall at the angle of the stair. Bell staggered out into
+the yard and fell dead. This story is borne out by the reports of Goss
+and the Kid, and by the bullet marks. The place is very familiar to the
+author, who at about that time practiced law in the same building, when
+it was used as the Court House, and who has also talked with many men
+about the circumstances.
+
+The Kid now sprang into the next room and caught up Ollinger's heavy
+shotgun, loaded with the very shells Ollinger had charged for him. He
+saw Ollinger coming across the street, and just as he got below the
+window at the corner of the building the Kid leaned over and said,
+coolly and pleasantly, "Hello, old fellow!" The next instant he fired
+and shot Ollinger dead. He then walked around through the room and out
+upon the porch, which at that time extended the full length of the
+building, and, coming again in view of Ollinger's body, took a second
+deliberate shot at it. Then he broke the gun across the railing and
+threw the pieces down on Ollinger's body. "Take that to hell with you,"
+he said coolly. Then, seeing himself free and once more king of Lincoln
+street, he warned away all who would approach, and, with a file which he
+compelled Goss to bring to him, started to file off one of his leg
+irons. He got one free, ordered a bystander to bring him a horse, and at
+length, mounting, rode away for the Capitans, and so to a country with
+which he had long been familiar. At Las Tablas he forced a Mexican
+blacksmith to free him of his irons. He sent the horse, which belonged
+to Billy Burt, back by some unknown friend the following night.
+
+He was now again on his native heath, a desperado and an outlaw indeed,
+and obliged to fight for his life at every turn; for now he knew the
+country would turn against him, and, as he had been captured through
+information furnished through supposed friends, he knew that treachery
+was what he might expect. He knew also that sheriff Garrett would never
+give him up now, and that one or the other of the two must die.
+
+Yet, knowing all these things, the Kid, by means of stolen horses, broke
+back once more to his old stamping grounds around Fort Sumner. Garrett
+again got on his trail, and as the Kid, with incredible fatuity, still
+hung around his old haunts, he was at length able to close with him once
+more. With his deputies, John Poe and Thomas P. McKinney, he located the
+Kid in Sumner, although no one seemed to be explicit as to his
+whereabouts. He went to Pete Maxwell's house himself, and there, as his
+two deputies were sitting at the edge of the gallery in the moonlight,
+he killed the Kid at Maxwell's bedside.
+
+Billy the Kid had very many actual friends, whom he won by his pleasant
+and cheerful manners and his liberality, when he had anything with which
+to be liberal, although that was not often. He was very popular among
+the Mexicans of the Pecos valley. As to the men the Kid killed in his
+short twenty-one years, that is a matter of disagreement. The usual
+story is twenty-one, and the Kid is said to have declared he wanted
+to kill two more--Bob Ollinger and "Bonnie" Baca--before he died, to
+make it twenty-three in all. Pat Garrett says the Kid had killed eleven
+men. Others say he had killed nine. A very few say that the Kid never
+killed any man without full justification and in self-defense. They
+regard the Kid as a scapegoat for the sins of others. Indeed, he was
+less fortunate than some others, but his deeds brought him his deserts
+at last, even as they left him an enduring reputation as one of the most
+desperate desperadoes ever known in the West.
+
+[Illustration: From a painting by John W. Norton
+"THE NEXT INSTANT HE FIRED AND SHOT OLLINGER DEAD"]
+
+Central and eastern New Mexico, from 1860 to 1880, probably held more
+desperate and dangerous men than any other corner of the West ever did.
+It was a region then more remote and less known than Africa is to-day,
+and no record exists of more than a small portion of its deeds of blood.
+Nowhere in the world was human life ever held cheaper, and never was any
+population more lawless. There were no courts and no officers, and most
+of the scattered inhabitants of that time had come thither to escape
+courts and officers. This environment which produced Billy the Kid
+brought out others scarcely less dangerous, and of a few of these there
+may be made passing mention.
+
+Joel Fowler was long considered a dangerous man. He was a ranch owner
+and cow man, but he came into the settlements often, and nearly always
+for the immediate purpose of getting drunk. In the latter condition he
+was always bloodthirsty and quarrelsome, and none could tell what or
+whom he might make the object of his attack. He was very insulting and
+overbearing, very noisy and obnoxious, the sort of desperado who makes
+unarmed men beg and compels "tenderfeet" to dance for his amusement. His
+birth and earlier life seem hidden by his later career, when, at about
+middle life, he lived in central New Mexico. He was accredited with
+killing about twenty men, but there may have been the usual exaggeration
+regarding this. His end came in 1884, at Socorro. He was arrested for
+killing his own ranch foreman, Jack Cale, a man who had befriended him
+and taken care of him in many a drunken orgy. He stabbed Cale as they
+stood at the bar in a saloon, and while every one thought he was
+unarmed. The law against carrying arms while in the settlements was then
+just beginning to be enforced; and, although it was recognized as
+necessary for men to go armed while journeying across those wild and
+little settled plains, the danger of allowing six-shooters and whiskey
+to operate at the same time was generally recognized as well. If a man
+did not lay aside his guns on reaching a town, he was apt to be invited
+to do so by the sheriff or town marshal, as Joel had already been asked
+that evening.
+
+Fowler's victim staggered to the door after he was stabbed and fell dead
+at the street, the act being seen by many. The law was allowed to take
+its course, and Fowler was tried and sentenced to be hanged. His lawyers
+took an appeal on a technicality and sent the case to the supreme court,
+where a long delay seemed inevitable. The jail was so bad that an
+expensive guard had to be maintained. At length, some of the citizens
+concluded that to hang Fowler was best for all concerned. They took him,
+mounted, to a spot some distance up the railroad, and there hanged him.
+Bill Howard, a negro section hand, was permitted by his section boss to
+make a coffin and bury Fowler, a matter which the Committee had
+neglected; and he says that he knows Fowler was buried there and left
+there for several years, near the railway tracks. The usual story says
+that Fowler was hanged to a telegraph pole in town. At any rate, he was
+hanged, and a very wise and seemly thing it was.
+
+Jesse Evans was another bad man of this date, a young fellow in his
+early twenties when he first came to the Pecos country, but good enough
+at gun work to make his services desirable. He was one of the very few
+men who did not fear Billy the Kid. He always said that the Kid might
+beat him with the Winchester, but that he feared no man living with the
+six-shooter. Evans came very near meeting an inglorious death. He and
+the notorious Tom Hill once held up an old German in a sheep camp near
+what is now Alamagordo, New Mexico. The old man did not know that they
+were bad men, and while they were looting his wagon, looking for the
+money he had in a box under the wagon seat, he slipped up and killed Tom
+Hill with his own gun, which had been left resting against a bush near
+by, nearly shooting Hill's spine out. Then he opened fire on Jesse, who
+was close by, shooting him twice, through the arm and through the lungs.
+The latter managed to get on his horse, bareback, and rode that night,
+wounded as he was, and partly trailed by the blood from his lungs,
+sixty miles or more to the San Augustine mountains, where he holed up at
+a friendly ranch, later to be arrested by Constable Dave Wood, from the
+railway settlements. In default of better jurisdiction, he was taken to
+Fort Stanton, where he lay in the hospital until he got ready to escape,
+when he seems to have walked away. Evans and his brother, who was known
+as George Davis--the latter being the true name of both--then went down
+toward Pecos City and got into a fight with some rangers, who killed his
+brother on the spot and captured Jesse, who was confined in the Texas
+penitentiary for twenty years. He escaped and was returned; yet in the
+year 1882, when he should have been in the Texas prison, he is said to
+have been seen and recognized on the streets of Lincoln. Evans, or
+Davis, is said to have been a Texarkana man, and to have returned to his
+home soon after this, only to find his wife living with another man, and
+supposing her first husband dead. He did not tell the new husband of his
+presence, but took away with him his boy, whom he found now well grown.
+It was stated that he went to Arizona, and nothing more is known of him.
+
+Tom Hill, the man above mentioned as killed by the sheep man, was a
+typical rough, dark, swarthy, low-browed, as loud-mouthed as he was
+ignorant. He was a braggart, but none the less a killer.
+
+Charlie Bowdre is supposed to have been a Texas boy, as was Tom Hill.
+Bowdre had a little ranch on the Rio Ruidoso, twenty miles or so from
+Lincoln; but few of these restless characters did much farming. It was
+easier to steal cattle, and to eat beef free if one were hungry. Bowdre
+joined Billy the Kid's gang and turned outlaw for a trade. It was all
+over with his chances of settling down after that. He was a man who
+liked to talk of what he could do, and a very steady practicer with the
+six-shooter, with which weapon he was a good shot, or just good enough
+to get himself killed by sheriff Pat Garrett.
+
+Frank Baker, murdered by his former friend, Billy the Kid, at Agua
+Negra, near the Capitans, was part Cherokee in blood, a well-spoken and
+pleasant man and a good cow hand. He was drawn into this fighting
+through his work for Chisum as a hired man. Baker was said to be
+connected with a good family in Virginia, who looked up the facts of his
+death.
+
+Billy Morton, killed with Baker by the Kid, was a similar instance of a
+young man loving the saddle and six-shooter and finally getting tangled
+up with matters outside his proper sphere as a cow hand. He had often
+ridden with the Kid on the cow range. He was said to have been with the
+posse that killed Tunstall.
+
+Hendry Brown was a crack gun fighter, whose services were valued in the
+posse fighting. He went to Kansas and long served as marshal of
+Caldwell. He could not stand it to be good, and was killed after robbing
+the bank and killing the cashier.
+
+Johnny Hurley was a brave young man, as brave as a lion. Hurley was
+acting as deputy for sheriff John Poe, together with Jim Brent, when the
+desperado Arragon was holed up in an adobe and refused to surrender. The
+Mexican shot Hurley as he carelessly crossed an open space directly in
+front of the door. Hurley was brown-haired and blue-eyed; a very
+pleasant fellow.
+
+Andy Boyle, one of the rough and ruthless sort of warriors, was an
+ex-British soldier, a drunkard, and a good deal of a ruffian. He drank
+himself to death after a decidedly mixed record.
+
+John McKinney had a certain fame from the fact that in the fight at the
+McSween house the Kid shot off half his mustache for him at close range,
+when the latter broke out of cover and ran.
+
+The tough buffalo hunter, Bill Campbell, who figured largely in bloody
+deeds in New Mexico, was arrested, but escaped from Fort Stanton, and
+was never heard from afterward. He came from Texas, but little is known
+of him. His name, as earlier stated, is thought to have been Ed.
+Richardson.
+
+Captain Joseph C. Lea, the staunch friend of Pat Garrett, and the man
+who first brought him forward as a candidate for sheriff of Lincoln
+county, died February 8, 1904, at Roswell, where he lived for a long
+time. Lea was said to have been a Quantrell man in the Lawrence
+massacre. Much of the population of that region had a history that was
+never written. Lea was a good man and much respected, peaceable,
+courteous and generous.
+
+One more southwestern bad man found Texas congenial after the close of
+his active fighting, and his is a striking story. Billy Wilson was a
+gentlemanly and good-looking young fellow, who ran with Billy the Kid's
+gang. Wilson was arrested on a United States warrant, charged with
+passing counterfeit money; but he later escaped and disappeared. Several
+years after all these events had happened, and after the country had
+settled down into quiet, a certain ex-sheriff of Lincoln county chanced
+to be near Uvalde, Texas, for several months. There came to him without
+invitation, a former merchant of White Oaks, New Mexico, who told the
+officer that Billy Wilson, under another name, was living below Uvalde,
+towards the Mexican frontier. He stated that Wilson had been a cow hand,
+a ranch foreman and cow man, was now doing well, had resigned all his
+bad habits, and was a good citizen. He stated that Wilson had heard of
+the officer's presence and asked whether the latter would not forego
+following up a reformed man on the old charges of another and different
+day. The officer replied at once that if Wilson was indeed leading a
+right life, and did not intend to go bad again, he would not only leave
+him alone, but would endeavor to secure for him a pardon from the
+president of the United States. Less than six months from that time,
+this pardon, signed by President Grover Cleveland, was in the possession
+of this officer, in his office in a Rio Grande town of New Mexico. A
+telegram was sent to Billy Wilson, and he was brave man enough to come
+and take his chances. The officer, without much speech, went over to his
+safe, took out the signed pardon from the president, and handed it to
+Wilson. The latter trembled and broke into tears as he took the paper.
+"If you ever need my life," said he, "count on me. And I'll never go
+back on this!" as he touched the executive pardon. He went back to
+Texas, and is living there to-day, a good citizen. It would be wrong to
+mention names in an incident like this.
+
+Tom O'Folliard was another noted character. He was something of a gun
+expert, in his own belief, at least. He was a man of medium height and
+dark complexion, and of no very great amount of mental capacity. He came
+into the lower range from somewhere east, probably from Texas, and
+little is known of him except that he was in some fighting, and that he
+is buried at Sumner with Bowdre and the Kid. He got away with one or two
+bluffs and encounters, and came to think that he was as good as the best
+of men, or rather as bad as the worst; for he was one of those who
+wanted a reputation as a bad man.
+
+Tom Pickett was another not far from the O'Folliard class, ambitious to
+be thought wild and woolly and hard to curry; which he was not, when it
+came to the real currying, as events proved. He was a very pretty
+handler of a gun, and took pride in his skill with it. He seems to have
+behaved well after the arrest of the Kid's gang near Sumner, and is not
+known in connection with any further criminal acts, though he still for
+a long time wore two guns in the settlements. Once a well-known sheriff
+happened, by mere chance, to be in his town, not knowing Pickett was
+there. The latter literally took to the woods, thinking something was on
+foot in which he was concerned. Being reminded that he had lost an
+opportunity to show how bad he was he explained: "I don't want anything
+to do with that long-legs." Pickett, no doubt, settled down and became a
+useful man. Indeed, although it seems a strange thing to say, it is the
+truth that much of the old wildness of that border was a matter of
+general custom, one might also say of habit. The surroundings were wild,
+and men got to running wild. When times changed, some of them also
+changed, and frequently showed that after all they could settle down to
+work and lead decent lives. Lawlessness is sometimes less a matter of
+temperament than of surroundings.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVII
+
+The Fight of Buckshot Roberts--_Encounter Between a Crippled Ex-Soldier
+and the Band of Billy the Kid_--_One Man Against Thirteen._
+
+
+Next to the fight of Wild Bill with the McCandlas gang, the fight of
+Buckshot Roberts at Blazer's Mill, on the Mescalero Indian reservation,
+is perhaps the most remarkable combat of one man against odds ever known
+in the West. The latter affair is little known, but deserves its record.
+
+Buckshot Roberts was one of those men who appeared on the frontier and
+gave little history of their own past. He came West from Texas, but it
+is thought that he was born farther east than the Lone Star state. He
+was long in the United States army, where he reached the rank of
+sergeant before his discharge; after which he lingered on the frontier,
+as did very many soldiers of that day. He was at one time a member of
+the famous Texas rangers, and had reputation as an Indian fighter. He
+had been badly shot by the Comanches. Again, he was on the other side,
+against the rangers, and once stood off twenty-five of them, although
+nearly killed in this encounter. From these wounds he was so badly
+crippled in his right arm that he could not lift a rifle to his
+shoulder. He was usually known as "Buckshot" Roberts because of the
+nature of his wounds.
+
+Roberts took up a little ranch in the beautiful Ruidoso valley of
+central New Mexico, one of the most charming spots in the world; and all
+he asked was to be let alone, for he seemed able to get along, and not
+afraid of work. When the Lincoln County War broke out, he was recognized
+as a friend of Major Murphy, one of the local faction leaders; but when
+the fighting men curtly told him it was about time for him to choose his
+side, he as curtly replied that he intended to take neither side; that
+he had seen fighting enough in his time, and would fight no man's battle
+for him. This for the time and place was treason, and punishable with
+death. Roberts' friends told him that Billy the Kid and Dick Brewer
+intended to kill him, and advised him to leave the country.
+
+It is said that Roberts had closed out his affairs and was preparing to
+leave the country, when he heard that the gang was looking for him, and
+that he then gave them opportunity to find him. Others say that he went
+up to Blazer's Mill to meet there a friend of his by the name of Kitts,
+who, he heard, had been shot and badly wounded. There is other rumor
+that he went up to Blazer's Mill to have a personal encounter with Major
+Godfroy, with whom there had been some altercation. There is a further
+absurd story that he went for the purpose of killing Billy the Kid, and
+getting the reward which was offered for him. These latter things are
+unlikely. The probable truth is that he, being a brave man, though fully
+determined to leave the country, simply found it written in his creed to
+go up to Blazer's Mill to see his supposedly wounded friend, and also to
+see what there was in the threats which he had heard.
+
+There are living three eye-witnesses of what happened at that time:
+Frank and George Coe, ranchers on the Ruidoso to-day, and Johnnie
+Patten, cook on Carrizzo ranch. Patten was an ex-soldier of H Troop,
+Third Cavalry, and was mustered out at Fort Stanton in 1869. At the time
+of the Roberts fight, he was running the sawmill for Dr. Blazer. Frank
+Coe says that he himself was attempting to act as peacemaker, and that
+he tried to get Roberts to give up his arms and not make any fight.
+Patten says that he himself, at the peril of his life, had warned
+Roberts that Dick Brewer, the Kid, and his gang intended to kill him. It
+is certain that when Roberts came riding up on a mule, still wet from
+the fording of the Tularosa river, he met there Dick Brewer, Billy the
+Kid, George Coe, Frank Coe, Charlie Bowdre, Doc Middleton, one
+Scroggins, and Dirty Steve (Stephen Stevens), with others, to the number
+of thirteen in all. These men still claimed to be a posse, and were
+under Dick Brewer, "special constable."
+
+The Brewer party withdrew to the rear of the house. Frank Coe parleyed
+with Roberts at one side. Kate Godfroy, daughter of Major Godfroy,
+protested at what she knew was the purpose of Brewer and his gang. Dick
+Brewer said to his men, "Don't do anything to him now. Coax him up the
+road a way."
+
+Roberts declined to give up his weapons to Frank Coe. He stood near the
+door, outside the house. Then, as it is told by Johnnie Patten, who saw
+it all, there suddenly came around upon him from behind the house the
+gang of the Kid, all gun fighters, each opening fire as he came. The
+gritty little man gave back not a step toward the open door. Crippled by
+his old wounds so that he could not raise his rifle to his shoulder, he
+worked the lever from his hip. Here were a dozen men, the best fighting
+men of all that wild country, shooting at him at a distance of not a
+dozen feet; yet he shot Jack Middleton through the lungs, though failing
+to kill him. He shot a finger off the hand of George Coe, who then left
+the fight. Roberts then half stepped forward and pushed his gun against
+the stomach of Billy the Kid. For some reason the piece failed to fire,
+and the Kid was saved by the narrowest escape he ever had in his life.
+Charlie Bowdre now appeared around the corner of the house, and Roberts
+fired at him next. His bullet struck Bowdre in the belt, and cut the
+belt off from him. Almost at the same time, Bowdre fired at him and shot
+him through the body. He did not drop, but staggered back against the
+wall; and so he stood there, crippled of old and now wounded to death,
+but so fierce a human tiger that his very looks struck dismay into this
+gang of professional fighters. They actually withdrew around the house
+and left him there!
+
+Each claimed the credit for having shot the victim. "No," said Charlie
+Bowdre, "I shot him myself. I dusted him on both sides. I saw the dust
+fly out on both sides of his coat, where my bullet went clean through
+him." They argued, but they did not go around the house again.
+
+Roberts now staggered back into the house. He threw down his own
+Winchester and picked up a heavy Sharps' rifle which belonged to Dr.
+Appel, and which he found there, in Dr. Blazer's room. Brewer told Dr.
+Blazer to bring Roberts out, but, like a man, Blazer refused. Roberts
+pulled a mattress off the bed to the floor and threw himself down upon
+it near an open window in the front of the house. The gang had
+scattered, surrounding the house. Dick Brewer had taken refuge behind a
+thirty-inch sawlog near the mill, just one hundred and forty steps from
+the window near which this fierce little fighting man was lying, wounded
+to death. Brewer raised his head just above the top of the sawlog, so
+that he could see what Roberts was doing. His eyes were barely visible
+above the top of the log, yet at that distance the heavy bullet from
+Roberts' buffalo gun struck him in the eye and blew off the top of his
+head.
+
+Billy the Kid was now leader of the posse. His first act was to call his
+men together and ride away from the spot, his whole outfit whipped by a
+single man! There was a corpse behind them, and wounded men with them.
+
+Thirty-six hours later there was another corpse at Blazer's Mill. The
+doctor, brought over from Fort Stanton, could do nothing for Roberts,
+and he died in agony. Johnnie Patten, sawyer and rough carpenter, made
+one big coffin, and in this the two, Brewer and Roberts, were buried
+side by side. "I couldn't make a very good coffin," says Patten, "so I
+built it in the shape of a big V, with no end piece at the foot. We just
+put them both in together." And there they lie to-day, grim
+grave-company, according to the report of this eye-witness, who would
+seem to be in a position indicating accuracy. Emil Blazer, a son of Dr.
+Blazer, still lives on the site of this fierce little battle, and he
+says that the two dead men were buried separately, but side by side,
+Brewer to the right of Roberts. The little graveyard holds a few other
+graves, none with headboards or records, and grass now grows above them
+all.
+
+The building where Roberts stood at bay is now gone, and another adobe
+is erected a little farther back from the raceway that once fed the old
+mountain sawmill, but which now is not used as of yore. The old flume
+still exists where the water ran over onto the wheel, and the site of
+the old mill, which is now also torn down, is easily traceable. When the
+author visited the spot in the fall of 1905, all these points were
+verified and the distances measured. It was a long shot that Roberts
+made, and down hill. The vitality of the man who made it, his courage,
+and his tenacity alike of life and of purpose against such odds make
+Roberts a man remembered with admiration even to-day in that once bloody
+region.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVIII
+
+The Man Hunt--_The Western Peace Officer, a Quiet Citizen Who Works for
+a Salary and Risks His Life_--_The Trade of Man Hunting_--_Biography of
+Pat Garrett, a Typical Frontier Sheriff_.
+
+
+The deeds of the Western sheriff have for the most part gone
+unchronicled, or have luridly been set forth in fiction as incidents of
+blood, interesting only because of their bloodiness. The frontier
+officer himself, usually not a man to boast of his own acts, has quietly
+stepped into the background of the past, and has been replaced by others
+who more loudly proclaim their prominence in the advancement of
+civilization. Yet the typical frontier sheriff, the good man who went
+after bad men, and made it safe for men to live and own property and to
+establish homes and to build up a society and a country and a
+government, is a historical character of great interest. Among very
+many good ones, we shall perhaps best get at the type of all by giving
+the story of one; and we shall also learn something of the dangerous
+business of man hunting in a region filled with men who must be hunted
+down.
+
+Patrick Floyd Garrett, better known as Pat Garrett, was a Southerner by
+birth. He was born in Chambers county, Alabama, June 5, 1850. In 1856,
+his parents moved to Claiborne parish, Louisiana, where his father was a
+large landowner, and of course at that time and place, a slave owner,
+and among the bitter opponents of the new _r�gime_ which followed the
+civil war. When young Garrett's father died, the large estates dwindled
+under bad management; and when within a short time the mother followed
+her husband to the grave, the family resources, affected by the war,
+became involved, although the two Garrett plantations embraced nearly
+three thousand acres of rich Louisiana soil. On January 25, 1869, Pat
+Garrett, a tall and slender youth of eighteen, set out to seek his
+fortunes in the wild West, with no resources but such as lay in his
+brains and body.
+
+He went to Lancaster, in Dallas county, Texas. A big ranch owner in
+southern Texas wanted men, and Pat Garrett packed up and went home with
+him. The world was new to him, however, and he went off with the
+north-bound cows, like many another youngster of the time. His herd was
+made up at Eagle Lake, and he only accompanied the drive as far north as
+Denison. There he began to get uneasy, hearing of the delights of the
+still wilder life of the buffalo hunters on the great plains which lay
+to the west, in the Panhandle of Texas. For three winters, 1875 to 1877,
+he was in and out between the buffalo range and the settlements, by this
+time well wedded to frontier life.
+
+In the fall of 1877, he went West once more, and this time kept on going
+west. With two hardy companions, he pushed on entirely across the wild
+and unknown Panhandle country, leaving the wagons near what was known as
+the "Yellow Houses," and never returning to them. His blankets, personal
+belongings, etc., he never saw again. He and his friends had their heavy
+Sharps' rifles, plenty of powder and lead, and their reloading tools,
+and they had nothing else. Their beds they made of their saddle
+blankets, and their food they killed from the wild herds. For their
+love of adventure, they rode on across an unknown country, until finally
+they arrived at the little Mexican settlement of Fort Sumner, on the
+Pecos river, in the month of February, 1878.
+
+[Illustration: PAT F. GARRETT
+The most famous peace officer of the Southwest]
+
+Pat and his friends were hungry, but all the cash they could find was
+just one dollar and a half between them. They gave it to Pat and sent
+him over to the store to see about eating. He asked the price of meals,
+and they told him fifty cents per meal. They would permit them to eat
+but once. He concluded to buy a dollar and a half's worth of flour and
+bacon, which would last for two or three meals. He joined his friends,
+and they went into camp on the river bank, where they cooked and ate,
+perfectly happy and quite careless about the future.
+
+As they finished their breakfast, they saw up the river the dust of a
+cattle herd, and noted that a party were working a herd, cutting out
+cattle for some purpose or other.
+
+"Go up there and get a job," said Pat to one of the boys. The latter did
+go up, but came back reporting that the boss did not want any help.
+
+"Well, he's got to have help," said Pat. So saying, he arose and
+started up stream himself.
+
+Garrett was at that time, as has been said, of very great height, six
+feet four and one-half inches, and very slender. Unable to get trousers
+long enough for his legs, he had pieced down his best pair with about
+three feet of buffalo leggins with the hair out. Gaunt, dusty, and
+unshaven, he looked hard, and when he approached the herd owner and
+asked for work, the other was as much alarmed as pleased. He declined
+again, but Pat firmly told him he had come to go to work, and was sorry,
+but it could not be helped. Something in the quiet voice of Garrett
+seemed to arrest the attention of the cow man. "What can you do,
+Lengthy?" he asked.
+
+"Ride anything with hair, and rope better than any man you've got here,"
+answered Garrett, casting a critical glance at the other men.
+
+The cow man hesitated a moment and then said, "Get in." Pat got in. He
+stayed in. Two years later he was still at Fort Sumner, and married.
+
+Garrett moved down from Fort Sumner soon after his marriage, and settled
+a mile east of what is now the flourishing city of Roswell, at a spring
+on the bank of the Hondo, and in the middle of what was then the virgin
+plains. Here he picked up land, until he had in all more than twelve
+hundred and fifty acres. If he owned it now, he would be worth a half
+million dollars.
+
+He was not, however, to live the steady life of the frontier farmer. His
+friend, Captain J. C. Lea, of Roswell, came to him and asked if he would
+run as sheriff of Lincoln county. Garrett consented and was elected. He
+was warned not to take this office, and word was sent to him by the
+bands of hard-riding outlaws of that region that if he attempted to
+serve any processes on them he would be killed. He paid no attention to
+this, and, as he was still an unknown quantity in the country, which was
+new and thinly settled, he seemed sure to be killed. He won the absolute
+confidence of the governor, who told him to go ahead, not to stand on
+technicalities, but to break up the gang that had been rendering life
+and property unsafe for years and making the territory a mockery of
+civilization. If the truth were known, it might perhaps be found that
+sometimes Garrett arrested a bad man and got his warrant for it later,
+when he went to the settlements. He found a straight six-shooter the
+best sort of warrant, and in effect he took the matter of establishing a
+government in southwestern New Mexico in his own hands, and did it in
+his own way. He was the whole machinery of the law. Sometimes he boarded
+his prisoners out of his own pocket. He himself was the state! His word
+was good, even to the worst cutthroat that ever he captured. Often he
+had in his care prisoners whom, under the law, he could not legally have
+held, had they been demanded of him; but he held them in spite of any
+demand; and the worst prisoner on that border knew that he was safe in
+Pat Garrett's hands, no matter what happened, and that if Pat said he
+would take him through to any given point, he would take him through.
+
+After he had finished his first season of work as sheriff and as United
+States marshal, Garrett ranched it for a time. In 1884, his reputation
+as a criminal-taker being now a wide one, he organized and took charge
+of a company of Texas rangers in Wheeler county, Texas, and made Atacosa
+and thereabouts headquarters for a year and a half. So great became his
+fame now as a man-taker that he was employed to manage the affairs of a
+cattle detective agency; it being now so far along in civilization that
+men were beginning to be careful about their cows. He was offered ten
+thousand dollars to break up a certain band of raiders working in upper
+Texas, and he did it; but he found that he was really being paid to kill
+one or two men, and not to capture them; and, being unwilling to act as
+the agent of any man's revenge, he quit this work and went into the
+employment of the "V" ranch in the White mountains. He then moved down
+to Roswell again, in the spring of 1887. Here he organized the Pecos
+Valley Irrigation Company. He was the first man to suspect the presence
+of artesian water in this country, where the great Spring rivers push up
+from the ground; and through his efforts wells were bored which
+revolutionized all that valley. He ran for sheriff of Chaves county, and
+was defeated. Angry at his first reverse in politics, he pulled up at
+Roswell, and sacrificed his land for what he could get for it. To-day it
+is covered with crops and fruits and worth sixty to one hundred dollars
+an acre.
+
+Garrett now went back to Texas, and settled near Uvalde, where he
+engaged once more in an irrigation enterprise. He was here five years,
+ranching and losing money. W. T. Thornton, the governor of New Mexico,
+sent for him and asked him if he would take the office of sheriff of
+Donna A�a county, to fill the unexpired term of Numa Raymond. He was
+elected to serve two subsequent terms as sheriff of Donna A�a county,
+and no frontier officer has a better record for bravery.
+
+In the month of December, 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt, who had
+heard of Garrett, met him and liked him, and without any ado or
+consultation appointed him collector of customs at El Paso, Texas. Here
+for the next four years Garrett made a popular collector, and an honest
+and fearless one.
+
+The main reputation gained by Garrett was through his killing the
+desperado, Billy the Kid. It is proper to set down here the chronicle of
+that undertaking, because that will best serve to show the manner in
+which a frontier sheriff gets a bad man.
+
+When the Kid and his gang killed the agency clerk, Bernstein, on the
+Mescalero reservation, they committed a murder on United States
+government ground and an offense against the United States law. A United
+States warrant was placed in the hands of Pat Garrett, then deputy
+United States marshal and sheriff-elect, and he took up the trail,
+locating the men near Fort Sumner, at the ranch of one Brazil, about
+nine miles east of the settlement. With the Kid were Charlie Bowdre, Tom
+O'Folliard, Tom Pickett and Dave Rudabaugh, fellows of like kidney.
+Rudabaugh had just broken jail at Las Vegas, and had killed his jailer.
+Not a man of the band had ever hesitated at murder. They were now eager
+to kill Garrett and kept watch, as best they could, on all his
+movements.
+
+One day Garrett and some of his improvised posse were riding eastward of
+the town when they jumped Tom O'Folliard, who was mounted on a horse
+that proved too good for them in a chase of several miles. Garrett at
+last was left alone following O'Folliard, and fired at him twice. The
+latter later admitted that he fired twenty times at Garrett with his
+Winchester; but it was hard to do good shooting from the saddle at two
+or three hundred yards range, so neither man was hit. O'Folliard did not
+learn his lesson. A few nights later, in company with Tom Pickett, he
+rode into town. Warned of his approach, Garrett with another man was
+waiting, hidden in the shadow of a building. As O'Folliard rode up, he
+was ordered to throw up his hands, but went after his gun instead, and
+on the instant Garrett shot him through the body. "You never heard a man
+scream the way he did," said Garrett. "He dropped his gun when he was
+hit, but we did not know that, and as we ran up to catch his horse, we
+ordered him again to throw up his hands. He said he couldn't, that he
+was killed. We helped him down then, and took him in the house. He died
+about forty-five minutes later. He said it was all his own fault, and
+that he didn't blame anybody. I'd have killed Tom Pickett right there,
+too," concluded Garrett, "but one of my men shot right past my face and
+blinded me for the moment, so Pickett got away."
+
+The remainder of the Kid's gang were now located in the stone house
+above mentioned, and their whereabouts reported by the ranchman whose
+house they had just vacated. The man hunt therefore proceeded
+methodically, and Garrett and his men, of whom he had only two or three
+upon whom he relied as thoroughly game, surrounded the house just before
+dawn. Garrett, with Jim East and Tom Emory, crept up to the head of the
+ravine which made up to the ridge on which the fortress of the
+outlaws stood. The early morning is always the best time for a surprise
+of this sort. It was Charlie Bowdre who first came out in the morning,
+and as he stepped out of the door his career as a bad man ended. Three
+bullets passed through his body. He stepped back into the house, but
+only lived about twenty minutes. The Kid said to him, "Charlie, you're
+killed anyhow. Take your gun and go out and kill that long-legged ----
+before you die." He pulled Bowdre's pistol around in front of him and
+pushed him out of the door. Bowdre staggered feebly toward the spot
+where the sheriff was lying. "I wish--I wish----" he began, and motioned
+toward the house; but he could not tell what it was that he wished. He
+died on Garrett's blankets, which were laid down on the snow.
+
+[Illustration: From a painting by John W. Norton
+A TYPICAL WESTERN MAN HUNT Pat F. Garrett chasing Tom O'Folliard]
+
+Previous to this Garrett had killed one horse at the door beam where it
+was tied, and with a remarkable shot had cut the other free, shooting
+off the rope that held it. These two shots he thought about the best he
+ever made; and this is saying much, for he was a phenomenal shot with
+rifle or revolver. There were two horses inside, but the dead horse
+blocked the door. Pickett now told the gang to surrender. "That fellow
+will kill every man that shows outside that door," said he, "that's all
+about it. He's killed O'Folliard, and he's killed Charlie, and he'll
+kill us. Let's surrender and take a chance at getting out again." They
+listened to this, for the shooting they had seen had pretty well broken
+their hearts.
+
+Garrett now sent over to the ranch house for food for his men, and the
+cooking was too much for the hungry outlaws, who had had nothing to eat.
+They put up a dirty white rag on a gun barrel and offered to give up.
+One by one, they came out and were disarmed. That night was spent at the
+Brazil ranch, the prisoners under guard and the body of Charlie Bowdre,
+rolled in its blankets, outside in the wagon. The next morning, Bowdre
+was buried in the little cemetery next to Tom O'Folliard. The Kid did
+not know that he was to make the next in the row.
+
+These men surrendered on condition that they should all be taken through
+to Santa F�, and Garrett, at the risk of his life, took them through Las
+Vegas, where Rudabaugh was wanted. Half the town surrounded the train in
+the depot yards. Garrett told the Kid that if the mob rushed in the
+door of the car he would toss back a six-shooter to him and ask him to
+help fight.
+
+"All right, Pat," said the Kid, cheerfully. "You and I can whip the
+whole gang of them, and after we've done it I'll go back to my seat and
+you can put the irons on again. You've kept your word." There is little
+doubt that he would have done this, but as it chanced there was no need,
+since at the last moment deputy Malloy, of Las Vegas, jumped on the
+engine and pulled the train out of the yard.
+
+Billy the Kid was tried and condemned to be executed. He had been
+promised pardon by Governor Lew Wallace, but the pardon did not come. A
+few days before the day set for his execution, the Kid, as elsewhere
+described, killed the two deputies who were guarding him, and got back
+once more to his old stamping grounds around Fort Sumner.
+
+"I knew now that I would have to kill the Kid," said Garrett to the
+writer, speaking reminiscently of the bloody scenes as we lately visited
+that country together. "We both knew that it must be one or the other of
+us if we ever met. I followed him up here to Sumner, as you know, with
+two deputies, John Poe and 'Tip' McKinney, and I killed him in a room
+up there at the edge of the old cottonwood avenue."
+
+He spoke of events now long gone by. It had been only with difficulty
+that we located the site of the building where the Kid's gang had been
+taken prisoners. The structure itself had been torn down and removed. As
+to the old military post, once a famous one, it offered now nothing
+better than a scene of desolation. There was no longer a single human
+inhabitant there. The old avenue of cottonwoods, once four miles long,
+was now ragged and unwatered, and the great parade ground had gone back
+to sand and sage brush. We were obliged to search for some time before
+we could find the site of the old Maxwell house, in which was ended a
+long and dangerous man hunt of the frontier. Garrett finally located the
+place, now only a rough quadrangle of crumbled earthen walls.
+
+"This is the place," said he, pointing to one corner of the grass-grown
+oblong. "Pete Maxwell's bed was right in this corner of the room, and I
+was sitting in the dark and talking to Pete, who was in bed. The Kid
+passed Poe and McKinney right over there, on what was then the gallery,
+and came through the door right here."
+
+We paused for a time and looked with a certain gravity at this
+wind-swept, desolate spot, around which lay the wide, unwinking desert.
+About us were the ruins of what had been a notable settlement in its
+day, but which now had passed with the old frontier.
+
+"I got word of the Kid up here in much the way I had once before,"
+resumed Garrett at length, "and I followed him, resolved to get him or
+to have him get me. We rode over into the edge of the town and learned
+that the Kid was there, but of course we did not know which house he was
+in. Poe went in to inquire around, as he was not known there like
+myself. He did not know the Kid when he saw him, nor did the Kid know
+him.
+
+"It was a glorious moonlight night; I can remember it perfectly well.
+Poe and McKinney and I all met a little way out from the edge of the
+place. We decided that the Kid was not far away. We went down to the
+houses, and I put Poe and McKinney outside of Pete Maxwell's house and I
+went inside. Right here was the door. We did not know it at that time,
+but just about then the Kid was lying with his boots off in the house
+of an old Mexican just across there, not very far away from Maxwell's
+door. He told the Mexican, when he came in, to cook something for him to
+eat. Maxwell had killed a beef not long before, and there was a quarter
+hanging up under the porch out in front. After a while, the Kid got up,
+got a butcher knife from the old Mexican, and concluded to go over and
+cut himself off a piece of meat from the quarter at Maxwell's house.
+This is how the story arose that he came into the house with his boots
+in his hand to keep an appointment with a Mexican girl.
+
+"The usual story is that I was down close to the wall behind Maxwell's
+bed. This was not the case, for the bed was close against the wall. Pete
+Maxwell was lying in bed, right here in this corner, as I said. I was
+sitting in a chair and leaning over toward him, as I talked in a low
+tone. My right side was toward him, and my revolver was on that side. I
+did not know that the Kid was so close at hand, or, indeed, know for
+sure that he was there in the settlement at all.
+
+"Maxwell did not want to talk very much. He knew the Kid was there, and
+knew his own danger. I was talking to him in Spanish, in a low tone of
+voice, as I say, when the Kid came over here, just as I have told you.
+He saw Poe and McKinney sitting right out there in the moonlight, but
+did not suspect anything. '_Quien es?_'--'Who is it?'--he asked, as he
+passed them. I heard him speak and saw him come backing into the room,
+facing toward Poe and McKinney. He could not see me, as it was dark in
+the room, but he came up to the bed where Maxwell was lying and where I
+was sitting. He seemed to think something might not be quite right. He
+had in his hand his revolver, a self-cocking .41. He could not see my
+face, and he had not heard my voice, or he would have known me.
+
+"The Kid stepped up to the bedside and laid his left hand on the bed and
+bent over Maxwell. He saw me sitting there in the half darkness, but did
+not recognize me, as I was sitting down. My height would have betrayed
+me had I been standing. 'Pete, _Quien es_?' he asked in a low tone of
+voice; and he half motioned toward me with his six-shooter. That was
+when I looked across into eternity. It wasn't far to go.
+
+"That was exactly how the thing was. I gave neither Maxwell nor the Kid
+time for anything farther. There flashed over my mind at once one
+thought, and it was that I had to shoot and shoot at once, and that my
+shot must go to the mark the first time. I knew the Kid would kill me in
+a flash if I did not kill him.
+
+"Just as he spoke and motioned toward me, I dropped over to the left and
+rather down, going after my gun with my right hand as I did so. As I
+fired, the Kid dropped back. I had caught him just about the heart. His
+pistol, already pointed toward me, went off as he fell, but he fired
+high. As I sprang up, I fired once more, but did not hit him, and did
+not need to, for he was dead.
+
+"I don't know that he ever knew who it was that killed him. He could not
+see me in the darkness. He may have seen me stoop over and pull. If he
+had had the least suspicion who it was, he would have shot as soon as he
+saw me. When he came to the bed, I knew who he was. The rest happened as
+I have told you. There is no other story about the killing of Billy the
+Kid which is the truth. It is also untrue that his body was ever removed
+from Fort Sumner. It lies there to-day, and I'll show you where we
+buried him. I laid him out myself, in this house here, and I ought to
+know."
+
+Twenty-five years of time had done their work in all that country, as we
+learned when we entered the little barbed-wire enclosure of the cemetery
+where the Kid and his fellows were buried. There are no headstones in
+this cemetery, and no sacristan holds its records. Again Garrett had to
+search in the salt grass and greasewood. "Here is the place," said he,
+at length. "We buried them all in a row. The first grave is the Kid's,
+and next to him is Bowdre, and then O'Folliard."
+
+Here was the sole remaining record of the man hunt's end. So passes the
+glory of the world! In this desolate resting-place, in a wind-swept and
+forgotten graveyard, rests all the remaining fame of certain bad men who
+in their time were bandit kings, who ruled by terror over half a Western
+territory. Even the headboard which once stood at the Kid's grave--and
+which was once riddled with bullets by cowards who would not have dared
+to shoot that close to him had he been alive--was gone. It is not likely
+that the graves will be visited again by any one who knows their
+locality. Garrett looked at them in silence for a time, then, turning,
+went to the buckboard for a drink at the canteen. "Well," said he,
+quietly, "here's to the boys, anyway. If there is any other life, I hope
+they'll make better use of it than they did of the one I put them out
+of."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIX
+
+Bad Men of Texas--_The Lone Star State Always a Producer of
+Fighters_--_A Long History of Border War_--_The Death of Ben Thompson_.
+
+
+A review of the story of the American desperado will show that he has
+always been most numerous at the edge of things, where there was a
+frontier, a debatable ground between civilization and lawlessness, or a
+border between opposing nations or sections. He does not wholly pass
+away with the coming of the law, but his home is essentially in a new
+and undeveloped condition of society. The edge between East and West,
+between North and South, made the territory of the bad man of the
+American interior.
+
+The far Southwest was the oldest of all American frontiers, and the
+stubbornest. We have never, as a nation, been at war with any other
+nation whose territory has adjoined our own except in the case of
+Mexico; and long before we went to war as a people against Mexico, Texas
+had been at war with her as a state, or rather as a population and a
+race against another race. The frontier of the Rio Grande is one of the
+bloodiest of the world, and was such long before Texas was finally
+admitted to the union. There was never any new territory settled by so
+vigorous and belligerent a population as that which first found and
+defended the great empire of the Lone Star. Her early men were, without
+exception, fighters, and she has bred fighters ever since.
+
+The allurement which the unsettled lands of the Southwest had for the
+young men of the early part of the last century lay largely in the
+appeal of excitement and adventure, with a large possibility of worldly
+gain as well. The men of the South who drifted down the old River Road
+across Mississippi and Louisiana were shrewd in their day and
+generation. They knew that eventually Texas would be taken away from
+Mexico, and taken by force. Her vast riches would belong to those who
+had earned them. Men of the South were even then hunting for another
+West, and here was a mighty one. The call came back that the fighting
+was good all along the line; and the fighting men of all the South, from
+Virginia to Louisiana, fathers and sons of the boldest and bravest of
+Southern families, pressed on and out to take a hand. They were
+scattered and far from numerous when they united and demanded a
+government of their own, independent of the far-off and inefficient head
+of the Mexican law. They did not want Coahuila as their country, but
+Texas, and asked a government of their own. Lawless as they were, they
+wanted a real law, a law of Saxon right and justice.
+
+Men like Crockett, Fannin, Travers and Bowie were influenced half by
+political ambition and half by love of adventure when they moved across
+the plains of eastern Texas and took up their abode on the firing line
+of the Mexican border. If you seek a historic band of bad men, fighting
+men of the bitterest Baresark type, look at the immortal defenders of
+the Alamo. Some of them were, in the light of calm analysis, little
+better than guerrillas; but every man was a hero. They all had a chance
+to escape, to go out and join Sam Houston farther to the east; but they
+refused to a man, and, plying the border weapons as none but such as
+themselves might, they died, full of the glory of battle; not in ranks
+and shoulder to shoulder, with banners and music to cheer them, but each
+for himself and hand to hand with his enemy, a desperate fighting man.
+
+The early men of Texas for generations fought Mexicans and Indians in
+turn. The country was too vast for any system of law. Each man had
+learned to depend upon himself. Each cabin kept a rifle and pistol for
+each male old enough to bear them, and each boy, as he grew up, was
+skilled in weapons and used to the thought that the only arbitrament
+among men was that of weapons. Part of the population, appreciating the
+exemptions here to be found, was, without doubt, criminal; made up of
+men who had fled, for reasons of their own, from older regions. These in
+time required the attention of the law; and the armed bodies of
+hard-riding Texas rangers, a remedy born of necessity, appeared as the
+executives of the law.
+
+The cattle days saw the wild times of the border prolonged. The buffalo
+range caught its quota of hard riders and hard shooters. And always the
+apparently exhaustless empires of new and unsettled lands--an enormous,
+untracked empire of the wild--beckoned on and on; so that men in the
+most densely settled sections were very far apart, and so that the law
+as a guardian could not be depended upon. It was not to be wondered at
+that the name of Texas became the synonym for savagery. That was for a
+long time the wildest region within our national confines. Many men who
+attained fame as fighters along the Pecos and Rio Grande and Gila and
+Colorado came across the borders from Texas. Others slipped north into
+the Indian Nations, and left their mark there. Some went to the mines of
+the Rockies, or the cattle ranges from Montana to Arizona. Many stayed
+at home, and finished their eventful lives there in the usual
+fashion--killing now and again, then oftener, until at length they
+killed once too often and got hanged; or not often enough once, and so
+got shot.
+
+To undertake to give even the most superficial study to a field so vast
+as this would require a dozen times the space we may afford, and would
+lead us far into matters of history other than those intended. We can
+only point out that the men of the Lone Star state left their stamp as
+horsemen and weapon-bearers clear on to the north, and as far as the
+foot of the Arctic circle. Their language and their methods mark the
+entire cattle business of the plains from the Rio Grande to the
+Selkirks. Theirs was a great school for frontiersmen, and its graduates
+gave full account of themselves wherever they went. Among them were bad
+men, as bad as the worst of any land, and in numbers not capable of
+compass even in a broad estimate.
+
+Some citizens of Montgomery county, Texas, were not long ago sitting in
+a store of an evening, and they fell to counting up the homicides which
+had fallen under their notice in that county within recent memory. They
+counted up seventy-five authenticated cases, and could not claim
+comprehensiveness for their tally. Many a county of Texas could do as
+well or better, and there are many counties. It takes you two days to
+ride across Texas by railway. A review of the bad man field of Texas
+pauses for obvious reasons!
+
+So many bad men of Texas have attained reputation far wider than their
+state that it became a proverb upon the frontier that any man born on
+Texas soil would shoot, just as any horse born there would "buck." There
+is truth back of most proverbs, although to-day both horses and men of
+Texas are losing something of their erstwhile bronco character. That
+out of such conditions, out of this hardy and indomitable population,
+the great state could bring order and quiet so soon and so permanently
+over vast unsettled regions, is proof alike of the fundamental sternness
+and justness of the American character and the value of the American
+fighting man.
+
+Yet, though peace hath her victories not less than war, it is to be
+doubted whether in her own heart Texas is more proud of her statesmen
+and commercial kings than of her stalwart fighting men, bred to the use
+of arms. The beautiful city of San Antonio is to-day busy and
+prosperous; yet to-day you tread there ground which has been stained red
+over and over again. The names of Crockett, Milam, Travis, Bowie, endure
+where those of captains of industry are forgotten. Out of history such
+as this, covering a half century of border fighting, of frontier travel
+and merchandising, of cattle trade and railroad building, it is
+impossible--in view of the many competitors of equal claims--to select
+an example of bad eminence fit to bear the title of the leading bad man
+of Texas.
+
+There was one somewhat noted Texas character, however, whose life comes
+down to modern times, and hence is susceptible of fairly accurate
+review--a thing always desirable, though not often practical, for no
+history is more distorted, not to say more garbled, than that dealing
+with the somewhat mythical exploits of noted gun fighters. Ben Thompson,
+of Austin, killer of more than twenty men, and a very perfect exemplar
+of the creed of the six-shooter, will serve as instance good enough for
+a generic application. Thompson was not a hero. He did no deeds of war.
+He led no forlorn hope into the imminent deadly breach. His name is
+preserved in no history of his great commonwealth. He was in the opinion
+of certain peace officers, all that a citizen should not be. Yet in his
+way he reached distinction; and so striking was his life that even
+to-day he does not lack apologists, even as he never lacked friends.
+
+Ben Thompson was of English descent, and was born near Lockhart, Texas,
+according to general belief, though it is stated that he was born in
+Yorkshire, England. Later his home was in Austin, where he spent the
+greater part of his life, though roaming from place to place. Known as a
+bold and skillful gun man, he was looked on as good material for a
+hunter of bad men, and at the time of his death was marshal of police
+at Austin. In personal appearance Thompson looked the part of the
+typical gambler and gun fighter. His height was about five feet eight
+inches, and his figure was muscular and compact. His hair was dark and
+waving; his eyes gray. He was very neat in dress, and always took
+particular pains with his footwear, his small feet being always clad in
+well-fitting boots of light material, a common form of foppery in a land
+where other details of dress were apt to be carelessly regarded. He wore
+a dark mustache which, in his early years, he was wont to keep waxed to
+points. In speech he was quiet and unobtrusive, unless excited by drink.
+With the six-shooter he was a peerless shot, an absolute genius, none in
+all his wide surrounding claiming to be his superior; and he had a
+ferocity of disposition which grew with years until he had, as one of
+his friends put it, "a craving to kill people." Each killing seemed to
+make him desirous of another. He thus came to exercise that curious
+fascination which such characters have always commanded. Fear he did not
+know, or at least no test arising in his somewhat varied life ever
+caused him to show fear. He passed through life as a wild animal,
+ungoverned by the law, rejoicing in blood; yet withal he was held as a
+faithful friend and a good companion. To this day many men repel the
+accusation that he was bad, and maintain that each of his twenty
+killings was done in self-defense. The brutal phase of his nature was no
+doubt dominant, even although it was not always in evidence. He was
+usually spoken of as a "good fellow," and those who palliate or deny
+most of his wild deeds declare that local history has never been as fair
+to him as he deserved.
+
+Thompson's first killing was while he was a young man at New Orleans,
+and according to the story, arose out of his notions of chivalry. He was
+passing down the street in a public conveyance, in company of several
+young Creoles, who were going home from a dance in a somewhat
+exhilarated condition. One or two of the strangers made remarks to an
+unescorted girl, which Thompson construed to be offensive, and he took
+it upon himself to avenge the insult to womanhood. In the affray that
+followed he killed one of the young men. For this he was obliged to flee
+to old Mexico, taking one of the boats down the river. He returned
+presently to Galveston, where he set up as a gambler, and began to
+extend his reputation as a fighting man. Most of his encounters were
+over cards or drink or women, the history of many or most of the border
+killings.
+
+Thompson's list grew steadily, and by the time he was forty years of age
+he had a reputation far wider than his state. In all the main cities of
+Texas he was a figure more or less familiar, and always dreaded. His
+skill with his favorite weapon was a proverb in a state full of men
+skilled with weapons. Moreover, his disposition now began to grow more
+ugly, sullen and bloodthirsty. He needed small pretext to kill a man if,
+for the slightest cause, he took a dislike to him. To illustrate the
+ferocity of the man, and his readiness to provoke a quarrel, the
+following story is told of him:
+
+A gambler by the name of Jim Burdette was badly whipped by the
+proprietor of a variety show, Mark Wilson, who, after the fight, told
+Burdette that he had enough of men like him, who only came to his
+theater to raise trouble and interfere with his business, and that if
+either he or any of his gang ever again attempted to disturb his
+audiences that they would have him (Wilson) to deal with. The next day
+Ben Thompson, seated in a barber shop, heard about the row and said to
+a negro standing by: "Mack, d--n your nigger soul, you go down to that
+place this evening and when the house is full and everybody is seated,
+you just raise hell and we'll see what that ---- is made of." The
+program was carried out. The negro arose in the midst of the audience
+and delivered himself of a few blood-curdling yells. Instantly the
+proprietor came out of the place, but caught sight of Thompson, who had
+drawn a pair of guns and stood ready to kill Wilson. The latter was too
+quick for him, and quickly disappeared behind the scenery, after his
+shotgun. There was too much excitement that night, and the matter passed
+off without a killing. A few nights thereafter, Thompson procured some
+lamp-black, which he gave the gambler Burdette, with instructions to go
+to the theater, watch his chance, and dash the stuff in Wilson's face.
+This was done and when the ill-fated proprietor, who immediately went
+for his shotgun, came out with that weapon, Thompson fell to the ground,
+and the contents of the gun, badly fired at the hands of Wilson, his
+face full of lamp-black, passed over Thompson's head. Thompson then
+arose and filled Wilson full of holes, killing him instantly. The
+bartender, seeing his employer's life in danger, fired at Thompson
+wildly, and as Thompson turned on him he dodged behind the bar to
+receive his death wound through the counter and in his back. Thompson at
+the court of last resort managed to have a lot of testimony brought to
+bear, and, with a half dozen gamblers to swear to anything he needed, he
+was admitted to bail and later freed.
+
+He is said to have killed these two men for no reason in the world
+except to show that he could "run" a place where others had failed. A
+variation of the story is that a saloon keeper fired at Thompson as he
+was walking down the street in Austin, and missing him, sprang back
+behind the bar, Thompson shooting him through the head, through the bar
+front. Another man's life now meant little to him. He desired to be
+king, to be "chief," just as the leaders of the desperadoes in the
+mining regions of California and Montana sought to be "chief." It meant
+recognition of their courage, their skill, their willingness to take
+human life easily and carelessly and quickly, a singular ambition which
+has been so evidenced in no other part of the world than the American
+West. It is certain that the worst bad men all over Texas were afraid
+of Ben Thompson. He was "chief."
+
+Ben Thompson left the staid paths of life in civilized communities. He
+did not rob, and he did not commit theft or burglary or any highway
+crimes; yet toiling and spinning were not for him. He was, for the most
+part, a gambler, and after a while he ceased even to follow that calling
+as a means of livelihood. Forgetting the etiquette of his chosen
+profession, he insisted on winning no manner how and no matter what the
+game. He would go into a gambling resort in some town, and sit in at a
+game. If he won, very well. If he lost, he would become enraged, and
+usually ended by reaching out and raking in the money on the table, no
+matter what the decision of the cards. He bought drinks for the crowd
+with the money he thus took, and scattered it right and left, so that
+his acts found a certain sanction among those who had not been
+despoiled.
+
+To know what nerve it required to perform these acts of audacity, one
+must know something of the frontier life, which at no corner of the
+world was wilder and touchier than in the very part of the country where
+Thompson held forth. There were hundreds of men quick with the gun all
+about him, men of nerve, but he did not hesitate to take all manner of
+chances in that sort of population. The madness of the bad man was upon
+him. He must have known what alone could be his fate at last, but he
+went on, defying and courting his own destruction, as the finished
+desperado always does, under the strange creed of self-reliance which he
+established as his code of life. Thus, at a banquet of stockmen in
+Austin, and while the dinner was in progress, Thompson, alone, stampeded
+every man of them, and at that time nearly all stockmen were game. The
+fear of Thompson's pistol was such that no one would stand for a fight
+with him. Once Thompson went to the worst place in Texas, the town of
+Luling, where Rowdy Joe was running the toughest dance house in America.
+He ran all the bad men out of the place, confiscated what cash he needed
+from the gaming tables and raised trouble generally. He showed that he
+was "chief."
+
+In the early eighties, in the quiet, sleepy, bloody old town of San
+Antonio, there was a dance hall, gambling resort and vaudeville theater,
+in which the main proprietor was one Jack Harris, commonly known as
+Pegleg Harris. Thompson frequently patronized this place on his visits
+to San Antonio, and received treatment which left him with a grudge
+against Harris, whom he resolved to kill. He followed his man into the
+bar-room one day and killed Harris as he stood in the semi-darkness. It
+was only another case of "self-defense" for Thompson, who was well used
+to being cleared of criminal charges or left unaccused altogether; and
+no doubt Harris would have killed him if he could.
+
+After killing Harris, Thompson declared that he proposed to kill Harris'
+partners, Foster and Simms. He had an especial grudge against Billy
+Simms, then a young man not yet nineteen years of age, because, so it is
+stated, he fancied that Simms supplanted him in the affections of a
+woman in Austin; and he carried also his grudge against the gambling
+house, where Simms now was the manager. Every time Thompson got drunk,
+he declared his intention of killing Billy Simms, and as the latter was
+young and inexperienced, he trembled in his boots at this talk which
+seemed surely to spell his doom. Simms, to escape Thompson's wrath,
+removed to Chicago, and remained there for a time, but before long was
+summoned home to Austin, where his mother was very ill. Thompson knew
+of his presence in Austin, but with magnanimity declined to kill Simms
+while he was visiting his sick mother. "Wait till he goes over to
+Santone," he said, "then I'll step over and kill the little ----."
+Simms, presently called to San Antonio to settle some debt of Jack
+Harris' estate, of which as friend and partner of the widow he had been
+appointed administrator, went to the latter city with a heavy heart,
+supposing that he would never leave it alive. He was told there that
+Thompson had been threatening him many times; and Simms received many
+telegrams to that effect. Some say that Thompson himself telegraphed
+Simms that he was coming down that day to kill him. Certainly a friend
+of Simms on the same day wired him warning: "Party who wants to destroy
+you on train this day bound for San Antonio."
+
+Friends of Thompson deny that he made such threats, and insist that he
+went to San Antonio on a wholly peaceful errand. In any case, this
+guarded but perfectly plain message set Simms half distracted. He went
+to the city marshal and showed his telegram, asking the marshal for
+protection, but the latter told him nothing could be done until Thompson
+had committed some "overt act." The sheriff and all the other officers
+said the same thing, not caring to meet Thompson if they could avoid it.
+Simms later in telling his story would sob at the memory of his feeling
+of helplessness at that time. The law gave him no protection. He was
+obliged to take matters in his own hands. He went to a judge of the
+court, and asked him what he should do. The judge pondered for a time,
+and said: "Under the circumstances, I should advise a shotgun."
+
+Simms went to one of the faro dealers of the house, a man who was known
+as bad, and who never sat down to deal faro without a brace of big
+revolvers on the table; but this dealer advised him to go and "make
+friends with Thompson." He went to Foster, Harris' old partner, and laid
+the matter before him. Foster said, slowly, "Well, Billy, when he comes
+we'll do the best we can." Simms thought that he too was weakening.
+
+There was a big policeman, a Mexican by name of Coy, who was considered
+a brave man and a fighter, and Simms now went to him and asked for aid,
+saying that he expected trouble that night, and wanted Coy to do his
+duty. Coy did not become enthusiastic, though as a matter of fact
+neither he nor Foster made any attempt to leave the place. Simms turned
+away, feeling that his end was near. In desperation he got a shotgun,
+and for a time stationed himself near the top of the stair up which
+Thompson would probably come when entering the place. The theater was up
+one flight of stairs, and at the right was the customary bar, from which
+"ladies" in short skirts served drinks to the crowd during the variety
+performance, which was one of the attractions of the place.
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD CHISUM RANCH BELOW ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO]
+
+It was nervous work, waiting for the killer to come, and Simms could not
+stand it. He walked down the stairway, and took a turn around the block
+before he again ascended the stairs to the hall. Meantime, Ben Thompson,
+accompanied by another character, King Fisher, a man with several
+notches on his gun, had ascended the stairs, and had taken a seat on the
+right hand side and beyond the bar, in the row nearest the door. When
+Simms stepped to the foot of the stairs on his return, he met the
+barkeeper, who was livid with terror. He pointed trembling up the stair
+and whispered, "He's there!" Ben Thompson and King Fisher had as yet
+made no sort of demonstration. It is said that King Fisher had decoyed
+Thompson into the theater, knowing that a trap was laid to kill him. It
+is also declared that Thompson went in merely for amusement. A friend of
+the author, a New Mexican sheriff who happened to be in San Antonio, saw
+and talked with both men that afternoon. They were both quiet and sober
+then.
+
+Simms' heart was in his mouth, but he made up his mind to die game, if
+he had to die. Slowly he walked up the stairway. Such was Thompson's
+vigilance, that he quickly arose and advanced toward Simms, who stood at
+the top of the stairs petrified and unable to move a muscle. Before
+Simms could think, his partner, Foster, appeared on the scene, and as he
+stood up, Thompson saw him and walked toward him and said: "Hello,
+Foster, how are you?" Slowly and deliberately Foster spoke: "Ben, this
+world is not big enough for us both. You killed poor Jack Harris like a
+dog, and you didn't as much as give him a chance for his life. You and I
+can never be friends any more." Quick as a flash and with a face like a
+demon, Thompson drew his pistol and jammed it into Foster's mouth,
+cruelly tearing his lips and sending him reeling backward. While this
+was going on, Simms had retreated to the next step, and there drew his
+pistol, not having his shotgun in hand then. He stepped forward as he
+saw Foster reel from the blow Thompson gave him, and with sudden courage
+opened fire. His first shot must have taken effect, and perhaps it
+decided the conflict. Thompson's gun did not get into action. Simms kept
+on firing. Thompson reeled back against King Fisher, and the two were
+unable to fire. Meantime the big Mexican, Coy, showed up from somewhere,
+just as Foster had. Both Foster and Coy rushed in front of the line of
+fire of Simms' pistol; and then without doubt, Simms killed his own
+friend and preserver. Foster got his death wound in such position that
+Simms admitted he must have shot him. None the less Foster ran into
+Thompson as the latter reeled backwards upon Fisher, and, with the fury
+of a tiger, shoved his own pistol barrel into Thompson's mouth in turn,
+and fired twice, completing the work Simms had begun. The giant Coy
+hurled his bulk into the struggling mass now crowded into the corner of
+the room, and some say he held Ben Thompson's arms, though in the m�l�e
+it was hard to tell what happened. He called out to Simms, "Don't mind
+me," meaning that Simms should keep on firing. "Kill the ---- of ----!"
+he cried. Coy no doubt was a factor in saving Simms' life, for one or
+the other of these two worst men in the Southwest would have got a man
+before he fell, had he been able to get his hands free in the
+struggling. Coy was shot in the leg, possibly by Simms, but did not
+drop. Simms took care of Coy to the end of his life, Coy dying but
+recently.
+
+One of the men engaged in this desperate fight says that Coy did not
+hold Thompson, and that at first no one was shot to the floor. Thompson
+was staggered by Simms' first shot, which prevented a quick return of
+fire. It was Foster who killed Thompson and very likely King Fisher, the
+latter being hemmed in in the corner with Thompson in front of him. Coy
+rushed into the two and handled them so roughly that they never got
+their guns into action so far as known.
+
+Leaving the fallen men at the rear of the theater, Simms now went down
+stairs, carrying Foster's pistol, with two chambers empty (the shots
+that killed Thompson) and his own gun. He saw Thompson's brother Bill
+coming at him. He raised the gun to kill him, when Phil Shardein, then
+city marshal, jumped on Thompson and shielded him with his body,
+calling out, "Don't shoot, Billy, I've got him." This saved Bill
+Thompson's life. Then several shots were heard upstairs, and upon
+investigation, it was found that Coy had emptied his pistol into the
+dead body of Thompson. He also shot Fisher, to "make sure the ---- were
+dead."
+
+Thus they died at last, two of the most notorious men of Texas, both
+with their boots on. There were no tears. Many told what they would or
+could have done had Ben Thompson threatened them. This closing act in
+the career of Ben Thompson came in the late spring of 1882. He was then
+about forty-three years of age.
+
+King Fisher, who met death at the same time with Thompson, was a good
+disciple of desperadoism. He was a dark-haired, slender young man from
+Goliad county--which county seems to have produced far more than its
+share of bad men. He had killed six men and stolen a great many horses
+in his time. Had he lived longer, he would have killed more. He was not
+of the caliber sufficient to undertake the running of a large city, but
+there was much relief felt over his death. He had many friends, of
+course, and some of these deny that he had any intention of making
+trouble when he went into the theater with Ben Thompson, just as friends
+of the latter accuse King Fisher of treachery. There are never lacking
+men who regard dead desperadoes as martyrs; and indeed it is usually the
+case that there are mixed circumstances and frequently extenuating ones,
+to be found in the history of any killer's life.
+
+Another Goliad county man well known around San Antonio was Alfred Y.
+Allee, who was a rancher a short distance back from the railway. Allee
+was decent when sober, but when drunk was very dangerous, and was
+recognized as bad and well worth watching. Liquor seemed to transform
+him and to make him a bloodthirsty fiend. He had killed several men, one
+or two under no provocation whatever and when they were defenseless,
+including a porter on a railway train. It was his habit to come to town
+and get drunk, then to invite every one to drink with him and take
+offense at any refusal. He liked to be "chief" of the drinking place
+which he honored with his presence. He once ordered a peaceful citizen
+of San Antonio, a friend of the writer, up to drink with him, and when
+the latter declined came near shooting him. The man took his drink,
+then slipped away and got his shotgun. Perhaps his second thought was
+wiser. "What's the use?" he argued with himself. "Somebody'll kill Allee
+before long anyhow."
+
+This came quite true, for within the week Allee had run his course. He
+dropped down to Laredo and began to "hurrah" that town also. The town
+marshal, Joe Bartelow, was a Mexican, but something of a killer himself,
+and he resolved to end the Allee disturbances, once for all. It is said
+that Allee was not armed when at length they met in a saloon, and it is
+said that Bartelow offered his hand in greeting. At once Bartelow threw
+his arm around Allee's neck, and with his free hand cut him to death
+with a knife. Whether justifiable or not, that was the fashion of the
+homicide.
+
+Any man who has killed more than twenty men is in most countries
+considered fit to qualify as bad. This test would include the little
+human tiger, Tumlinson, of South Texas, who was part of the time an
+officer of the law and part of the time an independent killer in Texas.
+He had many more than twenty men to his credit, it was said, and his
+Mexican wife, smilingly, always said that "Tumlinson never counted
+Mexicans." He was a genius with the revolver, and as good a rifle shot
+as would often be found. It made no difference to him whether or not a
+man was running, for part of his pistol practice was in shooting at a
+bottle swinging in the wind from the bough of a tree. Legend goes that
+Tumlinson killed his wife and then shot himself dead, taking many
+secrets with him. He was bad.
+
+Sam Bass was a noted outlaw and killer in West Texas, accustomed to ride
+into town and to take charge of things when he pleased. He had many
+thefts and robberies to his credit, and not a few murders. His finish
+was one not infrequent in that country. The citizens got wind of his
+coming one day, just before he rode into Round Rock for a little raid.
+The city marshal and several others opened fire on Bass and his party,
+and killed them to a man.
+
+It was of such stuff as this that most of the bad men and indeed many of
+the peace officers were composed, along a wide frontier in the early
+troublous days following the civil war, when all the border was a
+seething mass of armed men for whom the law had as yet gained no
+meaning. To tell the story of more individuals would be to depart from
+the purpose of this work. Were these men wrong, and were they wholly
+and unreservedly bad? Ignorance and bigotry will be the first to give
+the answer, the first to apply to them the standards of these later
+days.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XX
+
+Modern Bad Men--_Murder and Robbery as a Profession_--_The School of
+Guerrilla Warfare_--_Butcher Quantrell; the James Brothers; the Younger
+Brothers_.
+
+
+Outlawry of the early border, in days before any pretense at
+establishment of a system of law and government, and before the holding
+of property had assumed any very stable form, may have retained a
+certain glamour of romance. The loose gold of the mountains, the loose
+cattle of the plains, before society had fallen into any strict way of
+living, and while plenty seemed to exist for any and all, made a
+temptation easily accepted and easily excused. The ruffians of those
+early days had a largeness in their methods which gives some of them at
+least a color of interest. If any excuse may be offered for lawlessness,
+any palliation for acts committed without countenance of the law, that
+excuse and palliation may be pleaded for these men if for any. But for
+the man who is bad and mean as well, who kills for gain, and who adds
+cruelty and cunning to his acts instead of boldness and courage, little
+can be said. Such characters afford us horror, but it is horror
+unmingled with any manner of admiration.
+
+Yet, if we reconcile ourselves to tarry a moment with the cheap and
+gruesome, the brutal and ignorant side of mere crime, we shall be
+obliged to take into consideration some of the bloodiest characters ever
+known in our history; who operated well within the day of established
+law; who made a trade of robbery, and whose capital consisted of
+disregard for the life and property of others. That men like this should
+live for years at the very door of large cities, in an old settled
+country, and known familiarly in their actual character to thousands of
+good citizens, is a strange commentary on the American character; yet
+such are the facts.
+
+It has been shown that a widely extended war always has the effect of
+cheapening human life in and out of the ranks of the fighting armies.
+The early wars of England, in the days of the longbow and buckler,
+brought on her palmiest days of cutpurses and cutthroats. The days
+following our own civil war were fearful ones for the entire country
+from Montana to Texas; and nowhere more so than along the dividing line
+between North and South, where feeling far bitterer than soldierly
+antagonism marked a large population on both sides of that contest. We
+may further restrict the field by saying that nowhere on any border was
+animosity so fierce as in western Missouri and eastern Kansas, where
+jayhawker and border ruffian waged a guerrilla war for years before the
+nation was arrayed against itself in ordered ranks. If mere blood be
+matter of our record here, assuredly, is a field of interest. The deeds
+of Lane and Brown, of Quantrell and Hamilton, are not surpassed in
+terror in the history of any land. Osceola, Marais du Cygne,
+Lawrence--these names warrant a shudder even to-day.
+
+This locality--say that part of Kansas and Missouri near the towns of
+Independence and Westport, and more especially the counties of Jackson
+and Clay in the latter state--was always turbulent, and had reason to
+be. Here was the halting place of the westbound civilization, at the
+edge of the plains, at the line long dividing the whites from the
+Indians. Here settled, like the gravel along the cleats of a sluice,
+the daring men who had pushed west from Kentucky, Tennessee, lower Ohio,
+eastern Missouri--the Boones, Carsons, Crocketts, and Kentons of their
+day. Here came the Mormons to found their towns, and later to meet the
+armed resistance which drove them across the plains. Here, at these very
+towns, was the outfitting place and departing point of the caravans of
+the early Santa F� trade; here the Oregon Trail left for the far
+Northwest; and here the Forty-niners paused a moment in their mad rush
+to the golden coast of the Pacific. Here, too, adding the bitterness of
+fanaticism to the courage of the frontier, came the bold men of the
+North who insisted that Kansas should be free for the expansion of the
+northern population and institutions.
+
+This corner of Missouri-Kansas was a focus of recklessness and daring
+for more than a whole generation. The children born there had an
+inheritance of indifference to death such as has been surpassed nowhere
+in our frontier unless that were in the bloody Southwest. The men of
+this country, at the outbreak of the civil war, made as high an average
+in desperate fighting as any that ever lived. Too restless to fight
+under the ensign of any but their own ilk, they set up a banner of their
+own. The black flags of Quantrell and of Lane, of border ruffian and
+jayhawker, were guidons under which quarter was unknown, and mercy a
+forgotten thing. Warfare became murder, and murder became assassination.
+Ambushing, surprise, pillage and arson went with murder; and women and
+children were killed as well as fighting men. Is it wonder that in such
+a school there grew up those figures which a certain class of writers
+have been wont to call bandit kings; the bank robbers and train robbers
+of modern days, the James and Younger type of bad men?
+
+The most notorious of these border fighters was the bloody leader,
+Charles William Quantrell, leader at the sacking of Lawrence, and as
+dangerous a partisan leader as ever threw leg into saddle. He was born
+in Hagerstown, Maryland, July 20, 1836, and as a boy lived for a time in
+the Ohio city of Cleveland. At twenty years of age, he joined his
+brother for a trip to California, _via_ the great plains. This was in
+1856, and Kansas was full of Free Soilers, whose political principles
+were not always untempered by a large-minded willingness to rob. A
+party of these men surprised the Quantrell party on the Cottonwood
+river, and killed the older brother. Charles William Quantrell swore an
+undying revenge; and he kept his oath.
+
+It is not necessary to mention in detail the deeds of this border
+leader. They might have had commendation for their daring had it not
+been for their brutality and treachery. Quantrell had a band of sworn
+men, held under solemn oath to stand by each other and to keep their
+secrets. These men were well armed and well mounted, were all fearless
+and all good shots, the revolver being their especial arm, as it was of
+Mosby's men in the civil war. The tactics of this force comprised
+surprise, ambush, and a determined rush, in turn; and time and again
+they defeated Federal forces many times their number, being thoroughly
+well acquainted with the country, and scrupling at nothing in the way of
+treachery, just as they considered little the odds against which they
+fought. Their victims were sometimes paroled, but not often, and a
+massacre usually followed a defeat--almost invariably so if the number
+of prisoners was small.
+
+Cold-blooded and unhesitating murder was part of their everyday life.
+Thus Jesse James, on the march to the Lawrence massacre, had in charge
+three men, one of them an old man, whom they took along as guides from
+the little town of Aubrey, Kansas. They used these men until they found
+themselves within a few miles of Lawrence, and then, as is alleged,
+members of the band took them aside and killed them, the old man begging
+for his life and pleading that he never had done them any wrong. His
+murderers were no more than boys. This act may have been that of bad
+men, but not of the sort of bad men that leaves us any sort of respect,
+such as that which may be given Wild Bill, even Billy the Kid, or any of
+a dozen other big-minded desperadoes.
+
+This assassination was but one of scores or hundreds. A neighbor
+suspected of Federal sympathies was visited in the night and shot or
+hanged, his property destroyed, his family killed. The climax of the
+Lawrence massacre was simply the working out of principles of blood and
+revenge. In that fight, or, more properly, that massacre, women and
+children went down as well as men. The James boys were Quantrell riders,
+Jesse a new recruit, and that day they maintained that they had killed
+sixty-five persons between them, and wounded twenty more! What was the
+total record of these two men alone in all this period of guerrilla
+fighting? It cannot be told. Probably they themselves could not
+remember. The four Younger boys had records almost or quite as bad.
+
+There, indeed, was a border soaked in blood, a country torn with
+intestinal warfare. Quantrell was beaten now and then, meeting fighting
+men in blue or in jeans, as well as leading fighting men; and at times
+he was forced to disband his men, later to recruit again, and to go on
+with his marauding up and down the border. His career attracted the
+attention of leaders on both sides of the opposing armies, and at one
+time it was nearly planned that Confederates should join the Unionists
+and make common cause against these guerrillas, who had made the name of
+Missouri one of reproach and contempt. The matter finally adjusted
+itself by the death of Quantrell in a fight at Smiley, Kentucky, in
+January, 1865.
+
+With a birth and training such as this, what could be expected for the
+surviving Quantrell men? They scattered over all the frontier, from
+Texas to Minnesota, and most of them lived in terror of their lives
+thereafter, with the name of Quantrell as a term of loathing attached to
+them where their earlier record was known. Many and many a border
+killing years later and far removed in locality arose from the
+implacable hatred descended from those days.
+
+As for the James boys, the Younger boys, what could they do? The days of
+war were gone. There were no longer any armed banners arrayed one
+against the other. The soldiers who had fought bravely and openly on
+both sides had laid down their arms and fraternized. The Union grew,
+strong and indissoluble. Men settled down to farming, to artisanship, to
+merchandising, and their wounds were healed. Amnesty was extended to
+those who wished it and deserved it. These men could have found a living
+easy to them, for the farming lands still lay rich and ready for them.
+But they did not want this life of toil. They preferred the ways of
+robbery and blood in which they had begun. They cherished animosity now,
+not against the Federals, but against mankind. The social world was
+their field of harvest; and they reaped it, weapon in hand.
+
+The James family originally came from Kentucky, where Frank was born,
+in Scott county, in 1846. The father, Robert James, was a Baptist
+minister of the Gospel. He removed to Clay county, Missouri, in 1849,
+and Jesse was born there in 1850. Reverend Robert James left for
+California in 1851 and never returned. The mother, a woman of great
+strength of character, later married a Doctor Samuels. She was much
+embittered by the persecution of her family, as she considered it. She
+herself lost an arm in an attack by detectives upon her home, in which a
+young son was killed. The family had many friends and confederates
+throughout the country; else the James boys must have found an end long
+before they were brought to justice.
+
+From precisely the same surroundings came the Younger boys, Thomas
+Coleman, or "Cole," Younger, and his brothers, John, Bruce, James, and
+Robert. Their father was Henry W. Younger, who settled in Jackson
+county, Missouri, in 1825, and was known as a man of ability and worth.
+For eight years he was county judge, and was twice elected to the state
+legislature. He had fourteen children, of whom five certainly were bad.
+At one time he owned large bodies of land, and he was a prosperous
+merchant in Harrisonville for some time. Cole Younger was born January
+15, 1844, John in 1846, Bruce in 1848, James in 1850, and Bob in 1853.
+As these boys grew old enough, they joined the Quantrell bands, and
+their careers were precisely the same as those of the James boys. The
+cause of their choice of sides was the same. Jennison, the Kansas
+jayhawker leader, in one of his raids into Missouri, burned the houses
+of Younger and confiscated the horses in his livery stables. After that
+the boys of the family swore revenge.
+
+At the close of the war, the Younger and James boys worked together very
+often, and were leaders of a band which had a cave in Clay county and
+numberless farm houses where they could expect shelter in need. With
+them, part of the time, were George and Ollie Shepherd; other members of
+their band were Bud Singleton, Bob Moore, Clel Miller and his brother,
+Arthur McCoy; others who came and went from time to time were regularly
+connected with the bigger operations. It would be wearisome to recount
+the long list of crimes these men committed for ten or fifteen years
+after the war. They certainly brought notoriety to their country. They
+had the entire press of America reproaching the State of Missouri; they
+had the governors of that state and two or three others at their wits'
+end; they had the best forces of the large city detective agencies
+completely baffled. They killed two detectives--one of whom, however,
+killed John Younger before he died--and executed another in cold blood
+under circumstances of repellant brutality. They raided over Missouri,
+Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, even as far east as West Virginia, as far
+north as Minnesota, as far south as Texas and even old Mexico. They
+looted dozens of banks, and held up as many railway passenger trains and
+as many stage coaches and travelers as they liked. The James boys alone
+are known to have taken in their robberies $275,000, and, including the
+unlawful gains of their colleagues, the Youngers, no doubt they could
+have accounted for over half a million dollars. They laughed at the law,
+defied the state and county governments, and rode as they liked, here,
+there, and everywhere, until the name of law in the West was a mockery.
+If magnitude in crime be claim to distinction, they might ask the title,
+for surely their exploits were unrivaled, and perhaps cannot again be
+equaled. And they did all of these unbelievable things in the heart of
+the Mississippi valley, in a country thickly settled, in the face of a
+long reputation for criminal deeds, and in a country fully warned
+against them! Surely, it seems sometimes that American law is weak.
+
+It was much the same story in all the long list of robberies of small
+country banks. A member of the gang would locate the bank and get an
+idea of the interior arrangements. Two or three of the gang would step
+in and ask to have a bill changed; then they would cover the cashier
+with revolvers and force him to open the safe. If he resisted, he was
+killed; sometimes killed no matter what he did, as was cashier Sheets in
+the Gallatin bank robbery. The guard outside kept the citizens terrified
+until the booty was secured; then flight on good horses followed. After
+that ensued the frantic and unorganized pursuit by citizens and
+officers, possibly another killing or two _en route_, and a return to
+their lurking place in Clay county, Missouri, where they never had any
+difficulty in proving all the _alibis_ they needed. None of these men
+ever confessed to a full list of these robberies, and, even years later,
+they all denied complicity; but the facts are too well known to warrant
+any attention to their denials, founded upon a very natural reticence.
+Of course, their safety lay in the sympathy of a large number of
+neighbors of something the same kidney; and fear of retaliation supplied
+the only remaining motive needed to enforce secrecy.
+
+Some of the most noted bank robberies in which the above mentioned men,
+or some of them, were known to have been engaged were as follows: The
+Clay County Savings Association, of Liberty, Missouri, February 14,
+1866, in which a little boy by name of Wymore was shot to pieces because
+he obeyed the orders of the bank cashier and gave the alarm; the bank of
+Alexander Mitchell & Co., Lexington, Missouri, October 30, 1860; the
+McLain Bank, of Savannah, Missouri, March 2, 1867, in which Judge McLain
+was shot and nearly killed; the Hughes & Mason Bank, of Richmond,
+Missouri, May 23, 1867, and the later attack on the jail, in which Mayor
+Shaw, Sheriff J. B. Griffin, and his brave fifteen-year-old boy were all
+killed; the bank of Russellville, Kentucky, March 20, 1868, in which
+cashier Long was badly beaten; the Daviess County Savings Bank, of
+Gallatin, Missouri, December 7, 1869, in which cashier John Sheets was
+brutally killed; the bank of Obocock Brothers, Corydon, Iowa, June 3,
+1871, in which forty thousand dollars was taken, although no one was
+killed; the Deposit Bank, of Columbia, Missouri, April 29, 1872, in
+which cashier R. A. C. Martin was killed; the Savings Association, of
+Ste. Genevieve, Missouri; the Bank of Huntington, West Virginia,
+September 1, 1875, in which one of the bandits, McDaniels, was killed;
+the Bank of Northfield, Minnesota, September 7, 1876, in which cashier
+J. L. Haywood was killed, A. E. Bunker wounded, and several of the
+bandits killed and captured as later described.
+
+These same men or some of them also robbed a stage coach now and then;
+near Hot Springs, Arkansas, for example, January 15, 1874, where they
+picked up four thousand dollars, and included ex-Governor Burbank, of
+Dakota, among their victims, taking from him alone fifteen hundred
+dollars; the San Antonio-Austin coach, in Texas, May 12, 1875, in which
+John Breckenridge, president of the First National Bank of San Antonio,
+was relieved of one thousand dollars; and the Mammoth Cave, Kentucky,
+stage, September 3, 1880, where they took nearly two thousand dollars in
+cash and jewelry from passengers of distinction.
+
+The most daring of their work, however, and that which brought them into
+contact with the United States government for tampering with the mails,
+was their repeated robbery of railway mail trains, which became a matter
+of simplicity and certainty in their hands. To flag a train or to stop
+it with an obstruction; or to get aboard and mingle with the train crew,
+then to halt the train, kill any one who opposed them, and force the
+opening of the express agent's safe, became a matter of routine with
+them in time, and the amount of cash they thus obtained was staggering
+in the total. The most noted train robberies in which members of the
+James-Younger bands were engaged were the Rock Island train robbery near
+Council Bluffs, Iowa, July 21, 1873, in which engineer Rafferty was
+killed in the wreck, and but small booty secured; the Gad's Hill,
+Missouri, robbery of the Iron Mountain train, January 28, 1874, in which
+about five thousand dollars was secured from the express agent, mail
+bags and passengers; the Kansas-Pacific train robbery near Muncie,
+Kansas, December 12, 1874, in which they secured more than fifty-five
+thousand dollars in cash and gold dust, with much jewelry; the
+Missouri-Pacific train robbery at Rocky Cut, July 7, 1876, where they
+held the train for an hour and a quarter and secured about fifteen
+thousand dollars in all; the robbery of the Chicago & Alton train near
+Glendale, Missouri, October 7, 1879, in which the James boys' gang
+secured between thirty-five and fifty thousand dollars in currency; the
+robbery of the Rock Island train near Winston, Missouri, July 15, 1881,
+by the James boys' gang, in which conductor Westfall was killed,
+messenger Murray badly beaten, and a passenger named MacMillan killed,
+little booty being obtained; the Blue Cut robbery of the Alton train,
+September 7, 1881, in which the James boys and eight others searched
+every passenger and took away a two-bushel sack full of cash, watches,
+and jewelry, beating the express messenger badly because they got so
+little from the safe. This last robbery caused the resolution of
+Governor Crittenden, of Missouri, to take the bandits dead or alive, a
+reward of thirty thousand dollars being arranged by different railways
+and express companies, a price of ten thousand dollars each being put
+on the heads of Frank and Jesse James.
+
+Outside of this long list of the bandit gang's deeds of outlawry, they
+were continually in smaller undertakings of a similar nature. Once they
+took away ten thousand dollars in cash at the box office of the Kansas
+City Fair, this happening September 26, 1872, in a crowded city, with
+all the modern machinery of the law to guard its citizens. Many acts at
+widely separated parts of the country were accredited to the Younger or
+the James boys, and although they cannot have been guilty of all of
+them, and, although many of the adventures accredited to them in Texas,
+Mexico, California, the Indian Nations, etc., bear earmarks of
+apocryphal origin, there is no doubt that for twenty years after the
+close of the civil war they made a living in this way, their gang being
+made up of perhaps a score of different men in all, and usually
+consisting of about six to ten men, according to the size of the
+undertaking on hand.
+
+Meantime, all these years, the list of homicides for each of them was
+growing. Jesse James killed three men out of six who attacked his house
+one night, and not long after Frank and he are alleged to have killed
+six men in a gambling fight in California. John and Jim Younger killed
+the Pinkerton detectives Lull and Daniels, John being himself killed at
+that time by Daniels. A little later, Frank and Jesse James and Clel
+Miller killed detective Wicher, of the same agency, torturing him for
+some time before his death in the attempt to make him divulge the
+Pinkerton plans. The James boys killed Daniel Askew in revenge; and
+Jesse James and Jim Anderson killed Ike Flannery for motives of robbery.
+This last set the gang into hostile camps, for Flannery was a nephew of
+George Shepherd. Shepherd later killed Anderson in Texas for his share
+in that act; he also shot Jesse James and for a long time supposed he
+had killed him.
+
+The full record of these outlaws will never be known. Their career came
+to an end soon after the heavy rewards were put upon their heads, and it
+came in the usual way, through treachery. Allured by the prospect of
+gaining ten thousand dollars, two cousins of Jesse James, Bob and
+Charlie Ford, pretending to join his gang for another robbery, became
+members of Jesse James' household while he was living _incognito_ as
+Thomas Howard. On the morning of April 3, 1882, Bob Ford, a mere boy,
+not yet twenty years of age, stepped behind Jesse James as he was
+standing on a chair dusting off a picture frame, and, firing at close
+range, shot him through the head and killed him. Bob Ford never got much
+respect for his act, and his money was soon gone. He himself was killed
+in February, 1892, at Creede, Colorado, by a man named Kelly.
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD FRITZ RANCH]
+
+[Illustration: A BORDER FORTRESS]
+
+Jesse James was about five feet ten inches in height, and weighed about
+one hundred and sixty-five pounds. His hair and eyes were brown. He had,
+during his life, been shot twice through the lungs, once through the
+leg, and had lost a finger of the left hand from a bullet wound. Frank
+James was slighter than his brother, with light hair and blue eyes, and
+a ragged, reddish mustache. Frank surrendered to Governor Crittenden
+himself at Jefferson City, in October, 1882, taking off his revolvers
+and saying that no man had touched them but himself since 1861. He was
+sentenced to the penitentiary for life, but later pardoned, as he was
+thought to be dying of consumption. At this writing, he is still alive,
+somewhat old and bent now, but leading a quiet and steady life, and
+showing no disposition to return to his old ways. He is sometimes seen
+around the race tracks, where he does but little talking. Frank James
+has had many apologists, and his life should be considered in connection
+with the environments in which he grew up. He killed many men, but he
+was never as cold and cruel as Jesse, and of the two he was the braver
+man, men say who knew them both. He never was known to back down under
+any circumstances.
+
+The fate of the Younger boys was much mingled with that of the James
+boys, but the end of the careers of the former came in more dramatic
+fashion. The wonder is that both parties should have clung together so
+long, for it is certain that Cole Younger once intended to kill Jesse
+James, and one night he came near killing George Shepherd through
+malicious statements Jesse James had made to him about the latter.
+Shepherd met Cole at the house of a friend named Hudspeth, in Jackson
+county, and their host put them in the same bed that night for want of
+better accommodations. "After we lay down," said Shepherd later, in
+describing this, "I saw Cole reach up under his pillow and draw out a
+pistol, which he put beside him under the cover. Not to be taken
+unawares, I at once grasped my own pistol and shoved it down under the
+covers beside me. Were it to save my life, I couldn't tell what reason
+Cole had for becoming my enemy. We talked very little, but just lay
+there watching each other. He was behind and I on the front side of the
+bed, and during the entire night we looked into each other's eyes and
+never moved. It was the most wretched night I ever passed in my life."
+So much may at times be the price of being "bad." By good fortune, they
+did not kill each other, and the next day Cole told Shepherd that he had
+expected him to shoot on sight, as Jesse James had said he would.
+Explanations then followed. It nearly came to a collision between Cole
+Younger and Jesse James later, for Cole challenged him to fight, and it
+was only with difficulty that their friends accommodated the matter.
+
+The history of the Younger boys is tragic all the way through. Their
+father was assassinated, their mother was forced to set fire to her own
+house and destroy it under penalty of death; three sisters were arrested
+and confined in a barracks at Kansas City, which during a high wind fell
+in, killed two of the girls and crippled the other. John Younger was a
+murderer at the age of fourteen, and how many times Cole Younger was a
+murderer, with or without his wish, will never be known. He was shot
+three times in one fight in guerrilla days, and probably few bad men
+ever carried off more lead than he.
+
+The story of the Northfield bank robbery in Minnesota, which ended so
+disastrously to the bandits who undertook it, is interesting as showing
+what brute courage, and, indeed, what fidelity and fortitude may at
+times be shown by dangerous specimens of bad men. The purpose of the
+robbery was criminal, its carrying out was attended with murder, and the
+revenge for it came sharp and swift. In all the annals of desperadoes,
+there is not a battle more striking than this which occurred in a sleepy
+and contented little village in the quiet northern farming country,
+where no one for a moment dreamed that the bandits of the rumored bloody
+lands along the Missouri would ever trouble themselves to come. The
+events immediately connected with this tragedy, the result of which was
+the ending of the Younger gang, were as hereinafter described.
+
+Bill Chadwell, alias Styles, a member of the James boys gang, had
+formerly lived in Minnesota. He drew a pleasing picture of the wealth
+of that country, and the ease with which it could be obtained by bandit
+methods. Cole Younger was opposed to going so far from home, but was
+overruled. He finally joined the others--Frank and Jesse James, Clel
+Miller, Jim and Bob Younger, Charlie Pitts and Chadwell. They went to
+Minnesota by rail, and, after looking over the country, purchased good
+horses, and prepared to raid the little town of Northfield, in Rice
+county. They carried their enterprise into effect on September 7, 1876,
+using methods with which earlier experience had made them familiar. They
+rode into the middle of the town and opened fire, ordering every one off
+the streets. Jesse James, Charlie Pitts and Bob Younger entered the
+bank, where they found cashier J. L. Haywood, with two clerks, Frank
+Wilcox and A. E. Bunker. Bunker started to run, and Bob Younger shot him
+through the shoulder. They ordered Haywood to open the safe, but he
+bluntly refused, even though they slightly cut him in the throat to
+enforce obedience. Firing now began from the citizens on the street, and
+the bandits in the bank hurried in their work, contenting themselves
+with such loose cash as they found in the drawers and on the counter.
+As they started to leave the bank, Haywood made a motion toward a drawer
+as if to find a weapon. Jesse James turned and shot him through the
+head, killing him instantly. These three of the bandits then sprang out
+into the street. They were met by the fire of Doctor Wheeler and several
+other citizens, Hide, Stacey, Manning and Bates. Doctor Wheeler was
+across the street in an upstairs room, and as Bill Chadwell undertook to
+mount his horse, Wheeler fired and shot him dead. Manning fired at Clel
+Miller, who had mounted, and shot him from his horse. Cole Younger was
+by this time ready to retreat, but he rode up to Miller, and removed
+from his body his belt and pistols. Manning fired again, and killed the
+horse behind which Bob Younger was hiding, and an instant later a shot
+from Wheeler struck Bob in the right elbow. Although this arm was
+disabled Bob shifted his pistol to his left hand and fired at Bates,
+cutting a furrow through his cheek, but not killing him. About this time
+a Norwegian by the name of Gustavson appeared on the street, and not
+halting at the order to do so, he was shot through the head by one of
+the bandits, receiving a wound from which he died a few days later. The
+gang then began to scatter and retreat. Jim Younger was on foot and was
+wounded. Cole rode back up the street, and took the wounded man on his
+horse behind him. The entire party then rode out of town to the west,
+not one of them escaping without severe wounds.
+
+As soon as the bandits had departed, news was sent by telegraph,
+notifying the surrounding country of the robbery. Sheriffs, policemen
+and detectives rallied in such numbers that the robbers were hard put to
+it to escape alive. A state reward of $1,000 for each was published, and
+all lower Minnesota organized itself into a determined man hunt. The
+gang undertook to get over the Iowa line, and they managed to keep away
+from their pursuers until the morning of the 13th, a week after the
+robbery. The six survivors were surrounded on that day in a strip of
+timber. Frank and Jesse James broke through, riding the same horse. They
+were fired upon, a bullet striking Frank James in the right knee, and
+passing through into Jesse's right thigh. None the less, the two got
+away, stole a horse apiece that night, and passed on to the Southwest.
+They rode bareback, and now and again enforced a horse trade with a
+farmer or livery-stable man. They got down near Sioux Falls, and there
+met Doctor Mosher, whom they compelled to dress their wounds, and to
+furnish them horses and clothing. Later on their horses gave out, and
+they hired a wagon and kept on. Their escape seems incomprehensible, yet
+it is the case that they got quite clear, finally reaching Missouri.
+
+Of the other bandits there were left Cole, Jim and Bob Younger and
+Charlie Pitts; and after these a large number of citizens followed
+close. In spite of the determined pursuit, they kept out of reach for
+another week. On the morning of September 21st, two weeks after the
+robbery, they were located in the woods along the Watonwan river, not
+far from Madelia. Sheriff Glispin hurriedly got together a posse and
+surrounded them in a patch of timber not over five acres in extent. In a
+short time more than one hundred and fifty men were about this cover;
+but although they kept up firing, they could not drive out the concealed
+bandits. Sheriff Glispin called for volunteers; and with Colonel Vaught,
+Ben Rice, George Bradford, James Severson, Charles Pomeroy and Captain
+Murphy moved into the cover. As they advanced, Charlie Pitts sprang out
+from the brush, and fired point blank at Glispin. At the same instant
+the latter also fired and shot Pitts, who ran a short distance and fell
+dead. Then Cole, Bob and Jim Younger stood up and opened fire as best
+they could, all of the men of the storming party returning their fire.
+Murphy was struck in the body by a bullet, and his life was saved by his
+pipe, which he carried in his vest pocket. Another member of the posse
+had his watch blown to pieces by a bullet. The Younger boys gave back a
+little, but this brought them within sight of those surrounding the
+thicket, so they retreated again close to the line of the volunteers.
+Cole and Jim Younger were now badly shot. Bob, with his broken right
+arm, stood his ground, the only one able to continue the fight, and kept
+his revolver going with his left hand. The others handed him their
+revolvers after his own was empty. The firing from the posse still
+continued, and at last Bob called out to them to stop, as his brothers
+were all shot to pieces. He threw down his pistol, and walked forward to
+the sheriff, to whom he surrendered. Bob always spoke with respect of
+Sheriff Glispin both as a fighter and as a peace officer. One of the
+farmers drew up his gun to kill Bob after he had surrendered, but
+Glispin told him to drop his gun or he would kill him.
+
+It is doubtful if any set of men ever showed more determination and more
+ability to stand punishment than these misled outlaws. Bob Younger was
+hurt less than any of the others. His arm had been broken at Northfield
+two weeks before, but he was wounded but once, slightly in the body, out
+of all the shots fired at him while in the thicket. Cole Younger had a
+rifle bullet in the right cheek, which paralyzed his right eye. He had
+received a .45 revolver bullet through the body, and also had been shot
+through the thigh at Northfield. He received eleven different wounds in
+the fight, or thirteen bad wounds in all, enough to have killed a half
+dozen men. Jim's case seemed even worse, for he had in his body eight
+buckshot and a rifle bullet. He had been shot through the shoulder at
+Northfield, and nearly half his lower jaw had been carried away by a
+heavy bullet, a wound which caused him intense suffering. Bob was the
+only one able to stand on his feet.
+
+Of the two men killed in town, Clel Miller and Bill Chadwell, the former
+had a long record in bank robberies; the latter, guide in the ill-fated
+expedition to Minnesota, was a horse thief of considerable note at one
+time in lower Minnesota.
+
+The prisoners were placed in jail at Faribault, the county seat of Rice
+county, and in a short time the Grand Jury returned true bills against
+them, charging them with murder and robbery. Court convened November
+7th, Judge Lord being on the bench. All of the prisoners pleaded guilty,
+and the order of the court was that each should be confined in the state
+penitentiary for the period of his natural life.
+
+The later fate of the Younger boys may be read in the succinct records
+of the Minnesota State Prison at Stillwater:
+
+     "_Thos. Coleman Younger_, sentenced Nov. 20, 1876, from Rice county
+     under a life sentence for the crime of Murder in the first degree.
+     Paroled July 14, 1901. Pardoned Feb. 4, 1903, on condition that he
+     leave the State of Minnesota, and that he never exhibit himself in
+     public in any way.
+
+     "_James Younger_, sentenced Nov. 20, 1876, from Rice county under a
+     life sentence for the crime of Murder in the first degree. Paroled
+     July 13, 1901. Shot himself with a revolver in the city of St.
+     Paul, Minn., and died at once from the wound inflicted on Oct. 19,
+     1902.
+
+     "_Robt. Younger_, sentenced Nov. 20, 1876, from Rice county under a
+     life sentence for the crime of Murder in the first degree. He died
+     Sept. 16, 1889, of phthisis."
+
+The James boys almost miraculously escaped, traveled clear across the
+State of Iowa and got back to their old haunts. They did not stop, but
+kept on going until they got to Mexico, where they remained for some
+time. They did not take their warning, however, and some of their most
+desperate train robberies were committed long after the Younger boys
+were in the penitentiary.
+
+In view of the bloody careers of all these men, it is to be said that
+the law has been singularly lenient with them. Yet the Northfield
+incident was conclusive, and was the worst setback ever received by any
+gang of bad men; unless, perhaps, that was the defeat of the Dalton gang
+at Coffeyville, Kansas, some years later, the story of which is given in
+the following chapter.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXI
+
+Bad Men of the Indian Nations--_A Hotbed of Desperadoes_--_Reasons for
+Bad Men in the Indian Nations_--_The Dalton Boys_--_The Most Desperate
+Street Fight of the West_.
+
+
+What is true for Texas, in the record of desperadoism, is equally
+applicable to the country adjoining Texas upon the north, long known
+under the general title of the Indian Nations; although it is now
+rapidly being divided and allotted under the increasing demands of an
+ever-advancing civilization.
+
+The great breeding ground of outlaws has ever been along the line of
+demarcation between the savage and the civilized. Here in the Indian
+country, as though in a hotbed especially contrived, the desperado has
+flourished for generations. The Indians themselves retained much their
+old savage standards after they had been placed in this supposedly
+perpetual haven of refuge by the government. They have been followed,
+ever since the first movement of the tribes into these reservations, by
+numbers of unscrupulous whites such as hang on the outskirts of the
+settlements and rebel at the requirements of civilization. Many white
+men of certain type married among the Indians, and the half-breed is
+reputed as a product inheriting the bad traits of both races and the
+good ones of neither--a sweeping statement not always wholly true. Among
+these also was a large infusion of negro blood, emanating from the
+slaves brought in by the Cherokees, and added to later by negroes moving
+in and marrying among the tribes. These mixed bloods seem to have been
+little disposed toward the ways of law and order. Moreover, the system
+of law was here, of course, altogether different from that of the
+States. The freedom from restraint, the exemption from law, which always
+marked the border, here found their last abiding place. The Indians were
+not adherents to the white man's creed, save as to the worst features,
+and they kept their own creed of blood. No man will ever know how many
+murders have been committed in these fair and pleasant savannahs, among
+these rough hills or upon these rolling grassy plains from the time
+William Clark, the "Red Head Chief," began the government work of
+settling the tribes in these lands, then supposed to be far beyond the
+possible demands of the white population of America.
+
+Life could be lived here with small exertion. The easy gifts of the soil
+and the chase, coupled with the easy gifts of the government, unsettled
+the minds of all from those habits of steady industry and thrift which
+go with the observance of the law. If one coveted his neighbor's
+possessions, the ready arbitrament of firearms told whose were the
+spoils. Human life has been cheap here for more than half a hundred
+years; and this condition has endured directly up to and into the days
+of white civilization. The writer remembers very well that in his
+hunting expeditions of twenty years ago it was always held dangerous to
+go into the Nations; and this was true whether parties went in across
+the Neutral Strip, or farther east among the Osages or the Creeks. The
+country below Coffeyville was wild and remote as we saw it then,
+although now it is settling up, is traversed by railroads, and is slowly
+passing into the hands of white men in severalty, as fast as the
+negroes release their lands, or as fast as the government allows the
+Indians to give individual titles. In those days it was a matter of
+small concern if a traveler never returned from a journey among the
+timber clad mountains, or the black jack thickets along the rivers; and
+many was the murder committed thereabouts that never came to light.
+
+In and around the Indian Nations there have also always been refugees
+from the upper frontier or from Texas or Arkansas. The country was long
+the natural haven of the lawless, as it has long been the designated
+home of a wild population. In this region the creed has been much the
+same even after the wild ethics of the cow men yielded to the scarcely
+more lawful methods of the land boomer.
+
+Each man in the older days had his own notion of personal conduct, as
+each had his own opinions about the sacredness of property. It was
+natural that train robbing and bank looting should become recognized
+industries when the railroads and towns came into this fertile region,
+so long left sacred to the chase. The gangs of such men as the Cook
+boys, the Wickcliffe boys, or the Dalton boys, were natural and logical
+products of an environment. That this should be the more likely may be
+seen from the fact that for a decade or more preceding the great rushes
+of the land grabbers, the exploits of the James and Younger boys in
+train and bank robbing had filled all the country with the belief that
+the law could be defied successfully through a long term of years. The
+Cook boys acted upon this basis, until at length marshals shot them
+both, killed one and sent the remnants of the other to the penitentiary.
+
+Since it would be impossible to go into any detailed mention of the
+scores and hundreds of desperadoes who have at different times been
+produced by the Nations, it may be sufficient to give a few of the
+salient features of the careers of the band which, as well as any, may
+be called typical of the Indian Nations brand of desperadoism--the once
+notorious Dalton boys.
+
+The Dalton family lived in lower Kansas, near Coffeyville, which was
+situated almost directly upon the border of the Nations. They engaged in
+farming, and indeed two of the family were respectable farmers near
+Coffeyville within the last three or four years. The mother of the
+family still lives near Oklahoma City, where she secured a good claim at
+the time of the opening of the Oklahoma lands to white settlement. The
+father, Lewis Dalton, was a Kentucky man and served in the Mexican war.
+He later moved to Jackson county, Missouri, near the home of the
+notorious James and Younger boys, and in 1851 married Adelaide Younger,
+they removing some years later from Missouri to Kansas. Thirteen
+children were born to them, nine sons and four daughters. Charles,
+Henry, Littleton and Coleman Dalton were respected and quiet citizens.
+All the boys had nerve, and many of them reached office as deputy
+marshals. Franklin Dalton was killed while serving as deputy United
+States marshal near Fort Smith, in 1887, his brother Bob being a member
+of the same posse at the time his fight was made with a band of horse
+thieves who resisted arrest. Grattan Dalton, after the death of his
+brother Franklin, was made a deputy United States marshal, after the
+curious but efficient Western fashion of setting dangerous men to work
+at catching dangerous men. He and his posse in 1888 went after a bad
+Indian, who, in the mel�e, shot Grattan in the arm and escaped. Grattan
+later served as United States deputy marshal in Muskogee district, where
+the courts certainly needed men of stern courage as executives, for they
+had to deal with the most desperate and fearless class of criminals the
+world ever knew. Robert R. Dalton, better known as Bob Dalton, served on
+the posses of his brothers, and soon learned what it was to stand up and
+shoot while being shot at. He turned out to be about the boldest of the
+family, and was accepted as the clan leader later on in their exploits.
+He also was a deputy United States marshal at the dangerous stations of
+Fort Smith and Wichita, having much to do with the desperadoes of the
+Nations. He was chief of the Osage police for some time, and saw
+abundance of violent scenes. Emmett Dalton was also possessed of cool
+nerve, and was soon known as a dangerous man to affront. All the boys
+were good shots, but they seemed to have cared more for the Winchester
+than the six-shooter in their exploits, in which they were perhaps wise,
+for the rifle is of course far the surer when it is possible of use; and
+men mostly rode in that country with rifle under leg.
+
+Uncle Sam is obliged to take such material for his frontier peace
+officers as proves itself efficient in serving processes. A coward may
+be highly moral, but he will not do as a border deputy. The personal
+character of some of the most famous Western deputies would scarcely
+bear careful scrutiny, but the government at Washington is often
+obliged to wink at that sort of thing. There came a time when it
+remained difficult longer to wink at the methods of the Daltons as
+deputies. In one case they ran off with a big bunch of horses and sold
+them in a Kansas town. On account of this episode, Grattan, William, and
+Emmett Dalton made a hurried trip to California. Here they became
+restless, and went back at their old trade, thinking that no one even on
+the Pacific Slope had any right to cause them fear. They held up a train
+in Tulare county and killed a fireman, but were repulsed. Later arrested
+and tried, William was cleared, but Grattan was sentenced to twenty
+years in the penitentiary. He escaped from jail before he got to the
+penitentiary, and rejoined Emmett at the old haunts in the Nations,
+Emmett having evaded arrest in California. The Southern Pacific railway
+had a standing offer of $6,000 for the robbers at the time they were
+killed.
+
+The Daltons were now more or less obliged to hide out, and to make a
+living as best they could, which meant by robbery. On May 9, 1891, the
+Santa F� train was held up at Wharton, Oklahoma Territory, and the
+express car was robbed, the bandits supposedly being the Daltons. In
+June of the following year another Santa F� train was robbed at Red
+Rock, in the Cherokee strip. The 'Frisco train was robbed at Vinita,
+Indian Territory. An epidemic of the old methods of the James and
+Younger bands seemed to have broken out in the new railway region of the
+Southwest. The next month the Missouri, Kansas and Texas train was held
+up at Adair, Indian Territory, and a general fight ensued between the
+robbers and the armed guard of the train, assisted by citizens of the
+town. A local physician was killed and several officers and citizens
+wounded, but none of the bandits was hurt, and they got away with a
+heavy loot of the express and baggage cars. At Wharton they had been
+less fortunate, for though they killed the station agent, they were
+rounded up and one of their men, Dan Bryant, was captured, later killing
+and being killed by United States deputy Ed. Short, as mentioned in an
+earlier chapter. Dick Broadwell joined the Dalton gang about now, and
+they nearly always had a few members besides those of their own family;
+their gang being made up and conducted on much the same lines of the
+James boys gang of Missouri, whose exploits they imitated and used as
+text for their bolder deeds. In fact it was the boast of the leader, Bob
+Dalton, in the Coffeyville raid, that he was going to beat anything the
+James boys ever did: to rob two banks in one town at the same time.
+
+Bank robbing was a side line of activity with the Daltons, but they did
+fairly well at it. They held up the bank at El Reno, at a time when no
+one was in the bank except the president's wife, and took $10,000,
+obliging the bank to suspend business. By this time the whole country
+was aroused against them, as it had been against the James and Younger
+boys. Pinkerton detectives had blanket commissions offered, and railway
+and express companies offered rewards running into the thousands. Each
+train across the Indian Nations was accompanied for months by a heavily
+armed guard concealed in the baggage and express cars. Passengers
+dreaded the journey across that country, and the slightest halt of the
+train for any cause was sure to bring to the lips of all the word of
+fear, "the Daltons!" It seems almost incredible of belief that, in these
+modern days of fast railway service, of the telegraph and of rapidly
+increasing settlements, the work of these men could so long have been
+continued; but such, none the less, was the case. The law was powerless,
+and demonstrated its own unfitness to safeguard life and property, as so
+often it has in this country. And, as so often has been the case,
+outraged society at length took the law into its own hands and settled
+the matter.
+
+The full tale of the Dalton robberies and murders will never be known,
+for the region in which they operated was reticent, having its own
+secrets to protect; but at last there came the climax in which the band
+was brought into the limelight of civilized publicity. They lived on the
+border of savagery and civilization. Now the press, the telegraph, the
+whole fabric of modern life, lay near at hand. Their last bold raid,
+therefore, in which they crossed from the country of reticence into that
+of garrulous news gathering, made them more famous than they had ever
+been before. The raid on Coffeyville, October 5, 1892, both established
+and ended their reputation as desperadoes of the border.
+
+The rumor got out that the Daltons were down in the Nations, waiting for
+a chance to raid the town of Coffeyville, but the dreaded attack did not
+come off when it was expected. When it was delivered, therefore, it
+found the town quite unprepared. Bob Dalton was the leader in this
+enterprise. Emmett did not want to go. He declared that too many people
+knew them in Coffeyville, and that the job would prove too big for them
+to handle. He consented to join the party, however, when he found Bob
+determined to make the attempt in any case. There were in the band at
+that time Bob, Emmett, and Grattan Dalton, Bill Powers and Dick
+Broadwell. These lay in rendezvous near Tulsa, in the Osage country, two
+days before the raid, and spent the night before in the timber on Onion
+creek, not far below town. They rode into Coffeyville at half-past nine
+the following morning. The street being somewhat torn up, they turned
+aside into an alley about a hundred yards from the main street, and,
+dismounting, tied their horses, which were thus left some distance from
+the banks, the First National and the bank of C. M. Condon & Co., which
+were the objects of their design.
+
+Grattan Dalton, Dick Broadwell and Bill Powers stepped over to the
+Condon bank, which was occupied at the time by C. T. Carpenter, C. M.
+Ball, the cashier, and T. C. Babb, a bookkeeper. Grattan Dalton threw
+down his rifle on Carpenter, with the customary command to put up his
+hands; the others being attended to by Powers and Broadwell. Producing a
+two-bushel sack, the leader ordered Carpenter to put all the cash into
+it, and the latter obeyed, placing three thousand dollars in silver and
+one thousand in currency in the sack. Grattan wanted the gold, and
+demanded that an inner safe inside the vault should be opened. The
+cashier, Ball, with a shifty falsehood, told him that they could not
+open that safe, for it was set on a time lock, and no one could open it
+before half-past nine o'clock. He told the outlaw that it was now twenty
+minutes after nine (although it was really twenty minutes of ten); and
+the latter said they could wait ten minutes. He was, however, uneasy,
+and was much of the mind to kill Ball on the spot, for he suspected
+treachery, and knew how dangerous any delay must be.
+
+It was a daring thing to do--to sit down in the heart of a civilized
+city, in broad daylight and on the most public street, and wait for a
+time lock to open a burglar-proof safe. Daring as it was, it was foolish
+and futile. As the robbers stood uneasily guarding their prisoners, the
+alarm was spread. A moment later firing began, and the windows of the
+bank were splintered with bullets. The robbers were trapped, Broadwell
+being now shot through the arm, probably by P. L. Williams from across
+the street. Yet they coolly went on with their work as they best could,
+Grattan Dalton ordering Ball to cut the string of the bag and pour out
+the heavy silver, which would have encumbered them too much in their
+flight. He asked if there was not a back way out, by which they could
+escape. He was shown a rear door, and the robbers stepped out, to find
+themselves in the middle of the hottest street fight any of them had
+ever known. The city marshal, Charles T. Connolly, had given the alarm,
+and citizens were hurrying to the street with such weapons as they could
+find at the hardware stores and in their own homes.
+
+Meantime Bob and Emmett Dalton had held up the First National Bank,
+ordering cashier Ayres to hand out the money, and terrorizing two or
+three customers of the bank who happened to be present at the time. Bob
+knew Thos. G. Ayres, and called him by his first name, "Tom," said he,
+"go into the safe and get out that money--get the gold, too." He
+followed Ayres into the vault, and discovered two packages of $5,000
+each in currency, which he tossed into his meal sack. The robbers here
+also poured out the silver, and having cleaned up the bank as they
+supposed, drove the occupants out of the door in front of them. As they
+got into the street they were fired upon by George Cubine and C. S. Cox;
+but neither shot took effect. Emmett Dalton stood with his rifle under
+his arm, coolly tying up the neck of the sack which held the money. They
+then both stepped back into the bank, and went out through the back
+door, which was opened for them by W. H. Shepherd, the bank teller, who,
+with Tom Ayres and B. S. Ayres, the bookkeeper, made the bank force on
+hand. J. H. Brewster, C. H. Hollingsworth and A. W. Knotts were in the
+bank on business, and were joined by E. S. Boothby; all these being left
+unhurt.
+
+The firing became general as soon as the robbers emerged from the two
+bank buildings. The first man to be shot by the robbers was Charles T.
+Gump, who stood not far from the First National Bank armed with a
+shotgun. Before he could fire Bob Dalton shot him through the hand, the
+same bullet disabling his shotgun. A moment later, a young man named
+Lucius Baldwin started down the alley, armed with a revolver. He met
+Bob and Emmett, who ordered him to halt, but for some reason he kept on
+toward them. Bob Dalton said, "I'll have to kill you," and so shot him
+through the chest. He died three hours later.
+
+Bob and Emmett Dalton now passed out of the alley back of the First
+National Bank, and came into Union street. Here they saw George B.
+Cubine standing with his Winchester in his hands, and an instant later
+Cubine fell dead, with three balls through his body. Near him was
+Charles Brown, an old man, who was also armed. He was the next victim,
+his body falling near that of Cubine, though he lived for a few hours
+after being shot. All four of these victims of the Daltons were shot at
+distances of about forty or fifty yards, and with rifles, the revolver
+being more or less uncertain at such ranges even in practiced hands. All
+the gang had revolvers, but none used them.
+
+Thos. G. Ayres, late prisoner in the First National Bank, ran into a
+store near by as soon as he was released, caught up a Winchester and
+took a station near the street door, waiting for the bandits to come out
+at that entrance of the bank. Here he was seen by Bob Dalton, who had
+gone through the alley. Bob took aim and at seventy-five yards shot
+Ayres through the head. Friends tried to draw his body back into the
+store, but these now met the fire of Grattan Dalton and Powers, who,
+with the crippled Broadwell, were now coming out of their alleyway.
+
+T. A. Reynolds, a clerk in the same store, who went to the door armed,
+received a shot through the foot, and thus made the third wounded man
+then in that building. H. H. Isham, one of the owners of the store,
+aided by M. A. Anderson and Charles K. Smith, joined in the firing.
+Grattan Dalton and Bill Powers were shot mortally before they had gone
+more than a few steps from the door of the Condon bank. Powers tried to
+get into a door when he was shot, and kept his feet when he found the
+door locked, managing to get to his horse in the alley before he was
+killed by a second shot. Grattan Dalton also kept his feet, and reached
+cover back of a barn about seventy yards from Walnut Street, the main
+thorough-fare. He stood at bay here, and kept on firing. City marshal
+Connolly, carrying a rifle, ran across to a spot near the corner of this
+barn. He had his eye on the horses of the bandits, which were still
+hitched in the alley. His back was turned toward Grattan Dalton. The
+latter must have been crippled somewhere in his right arm or shoulder,
+for he did not raise his rifle to his face, but fired from his hip,
+shooting Connolly down at a distance of about twenty feet or so.
+
+There was a slight lull at this point of the street fight, and during
+this Dick Broadwell, who had been wounded again in the back, crawled
+into concealment in a lumber yard near by the alley where the horses
+were tied. He crept out to his horse and mounted, but just as he started
+away met the livery man, John J. Kloehr, who did some of the best
+shooting recorded by the citizens. Kloehr was hurrying thither with
+Carey Seaman, the latter armed with a shotgun. Kloehr fired his rifle
+and Seaman his shotgun, and both struck Broadwell, who rode away, but
+fell dead from his horse a short distance outside the town.
+
+Bob and Emmett Dalton, after killing Cubine and Brown and shooting
+Ayres, hurried on to join their companions and to get to their horses.
+At an alleyway junction they spied F. D. Benson climbing out of a
+window, and fired at him, but missed. An instant later, as Bob stepped
+into full view of those who were firing from the Isham store, he was
+struck by a ball and badly wounded. He walked slowly across the alley
+and sat down on a pile of stones, but like his brother Grattan, he kept
+his rifle going, though mortally shot. He fired once at Kloehr, but was
+unsteady and missed him. Rising to his feet he walked a few paces and
+leaned against the corner of a barn, firing two more shots. He was then
+killed by Kloehr, who shot him through the chest.
+
+By this time Grattan Dalton was feebly trying to get to his horse. He
+passed the body of Connolly, whom he had killed, faced toward his
+pursuers and tried to fire. He, too, fell before Kloehr's Winchester,
+shot through the throat, dropping close to the body of Connolly.
+
+Emmett Dalton was now the only one of the band left alive. He was as yet
+unwounded, and he got to his horse. As he attempted to mount a number of
+shots were fired at him, and these killed the two horses belonging to
+Bob Dalton and Bill Powers, who by this time had no further use for
+horses. Two horses hitched to an oil wagon in the street were also
+killed by wild shots. Emmett got into his saddle, but was shot through
+the right arm and through the left hip and groin. He still clung to the
+sack of money they had taken at the First National Bank, and he still
+kept his nerve and his wits even under such pressure of peril. He might
+have escaped, but instead he rode back to where Bob was lying, and
+reached down his hand to help him up behind himself on the horse. Bob
+was dying and told him it was no use to try to help him. As Emmett
+stooped down to reach Bob's arm, Carey Seaman fired both barrels of his
+shotgun into his back, Emmett dropping near Bob and falling upon the
+sack, containing over $20,000 in cash. Men hurried up and called to him
+to throw up his hands. He raised his one unhurt arm and begged for
+mercy. It was supposed he would die, and he was not lynched, but hurried
+away to a doctor's office near by.
+
+In the little alley where the last scene of this bloody fight took place
+there were found three dead men, one dying man and one badly wounded.
+Three dead horses lay near the same spot. In the whole fight, which was
+of course all over in a few moments, there were killed four citizens and
+four outlaws, three citizens and one outlaw being wounded. Less than a
+dozen citizens did most of the shooting, of which there was
+considerable, eighty bullet marks being found on the front of the
+Condon bank alone.
+
+The news of this bloody encounter was instantly flashed over the
+country, and within a few hours the town was crowded with sightseers who
+came in by train loads. The dead bandits were photographed, and the
+story of the fight was told over and over again, not always with
+uniformity of detail. Emmett Dalton, before he was sent to the
+penitentiary, confessed to different crimes, not all of them hitherto
+known, which the gang had at different times committed.
+
+So ended in blood the career of as bloody a band as might well be
+discovered in the robber history of any land or time of the world.
+Indeed, it is doubtful if any country ever saw leagues of robbers so
+desperate as those which have existed in America, any with hands so red
+in blood. This fact is largely due to the peculiar history of this
+country, with its rapid development under swift modern methods of
+transportation. In America the advance to the westward of the fighting
+edge of civilization, where it meets and mingles with savagery, has been
+more rapid than has ever been known in the settlement of any country of
+the world. Moreover, this has taken place at precisely that time when
+weapons of the most deadly nature have been invented and made at a price
+permitting all to own them and many to become extremely skilled with
+them. The temptation and the means of murder have gone hand in hand. And
+in time the people, not the organized law courts, have applied the
+remedy when the time has come for it. To-day the Indian Nations are no
+more than a name. Civilization has taken them over. Statehood has
+followed territorial organization. Presently rich farms will make a
+continuous sea of grain across what was once a flood of crime, and the
+wheat will grow yellow, and the cotton white, where so long the grass
+was red.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXII
+
+Desperadoes of the Cities--_Great Cities Now the Most Dangerous
+Places_--_City Bad Men's Contempt for Womanhood_--_Nine Thousand Murders
+a Year, and Not Two Hundred Punished_--_The Reasonableness of Lynch
+Law_.
+
+
+It was stated early in these pages that the great cities and the great
+wildernesses are the two homes for bold crimes; but we have been most
+largely concerned with the latter in our studies of desperadoes and in
+our search for examples of disregard of the law. We have found a
+turbulence, a self-insistence, a vigor and self-reliance in the American
+character which at times has led on to lawlessness on our Western
+frontier.
+
+Conditions have changed. We still revel in Wild West literature, but
+there is little of the wild left in the West of to-day, little of the
+old lawlessness. The most lawless time of America is to-day, but the
+most lawless parts of America are the most highly civilized parts. The
+most dangerous section of America is not the West, but the East.
+
+The worst men are no longer those of the mountains or the plains, but of
+the great cities. The most absolute lawlessness exists under the shadow
+of the tallest temples of the law, and in the penetralia of that society
+which vaunts itself as the supreme civilization of the world. We have
+had no purpose in these pages to praise any sort of crime or to glorify
+any manner of bad deeds; but if we were forced to make choice among
+criminals, then by all means that choice should be, must be, not the
+brutal murderer of the cities, but the desperado of the old West. The
+one is an assassin, the other was a warrior; the one is a dastard, the
+other was something of a man.
+
+A lawlessness which arises to magnitude is not called lawlessness; and
+killing more than murder is called war. The great industrial centers
+show us what ruthlessness may mean, more cruel and more dangerous than
+the worst deeds of our border fighting men. As for the criminal records
+of our great cities, they surpass by infinity those of the rudest
+wilderness anarchy. Their nature at times would cause a hardened
+desperado of the West to blush for shame.
+
+One distinguished feature of city badness is the great number of crimes
+against women, ranging from robbery to murder. Now, the desperado, the
+bandit, the robber of the wildest West never made war on any woman,
+rarely ever robbed a woman, even when women mingled with the victims of
+a "stand and deliver" general robbery of a stage or train. The man who
+would kill a woman in the West could never meet his fellow in fair fight
+again. The rope was ready for him, and that right quickly.
+
+But how is it in the great cities, under the shadow of the law? Forget
+the crimes of industrialism, the sweat-shops and factories, which
+undermine the last hope of a nation--the constitution of its women--and
+take the open and admitted crimes. One city will suffice for this, and
+that may be the city of Chicago.
+
+In Chicago, in the past twenty-four years, very nearly two thousand
+murders have been committed; and of these, two hundred remain mysteries
+to-day, their perpetrators having gone free and undetected. In the past
+year, seventeen women have been murdered in Chicago, some under
+circumstances too horrible to mention. In a list of fifty murders by
+unknown parties during the last few years, the whole gamut of dastardly
+crime has been run. The slaughter list is appalling. The story of this
+killing of women is so repellant that one turns to the bloodiest deeds
+of Western personal combats with a feeling of relief; and as one does so
+one adds, "Here at least were men."
+
+The story of Chicago is little worse, according to her population, than
+that of New York, of Boston, of any large city. Foot up the total of the
+thousands of murders committed every year in America. Then, if you wish
+to become a criminal statistician, compare that record with those of
+England, France or Germany. We kill ten persons to England's one; and we
+kill them in the cities.
+
+In the cities it is unlawful to wear arms, and to protect one's self
+against armed attack is therefore impossible. In the cities we have
+policemen. Against real fighting men, the average policeman would be
+helpless. Yet, such as he is, he must be the sole fence against the
+bloody-minded who do not scruple at robbery and murder. In the labor
+riots, the streets of a city are avenues of anarchy, and none of our
+weak-souled officials, held in the cursed thrall of politics, seems
+able to prevent it. A dozen town marshals of the old stripe would
+restore peace and fill a graveyard in one day of any strike; and their
+peace would be permanent. A real town marshal at the head of a city
+police force, with real fighting men under him, could restore peace and
+fill a graveyard in one month in any city; and that peace would be
+permanent. If we wished the law, we could have it.
+
+The history of the bloodiest lawlessness of the American past shows
+continual repetitions. First, liberty is construed to mean license, and
+license unrebuked leads on to insolence. Still left unrebuked, license
+organizes against the law, taking the form of gangs, factions, bandit
+clans. Then in time the spirit of law arises, and not the law, but the
+offended individuals wronged by too much license, take the matter into
+their own hands, not waiting for the courts, but executing a swifter
+justice. It is the terror of lynch law which has, in countless
+instances, been the foundation of the later courts, with their slow
+moving and absurdly inefficient methods. In time the inefficiency of the
+courts once more begets impatience and contempt. The people again rebel
+at the fact that their government gives them no government, that their
+courts give them no justice, that their peace officers give them no
+protection. Then they take matters into their hands once more, and show
+both courts and criminals that the people still are strong and terrible.
+
+The deprecation of lynch law, and the whining cry that the law should be
+supported, that the courts should pass on the punishment, is in the
+first place the plea of the weak, and in the second place, the plea of
+the ignorant. He has not read the history of this country, and has never
+understood the American character who says lynch law is wrong. It has
+been the salvation of America a thousand times. It may perhaps again be
+her salvation.
+
+In one way or another the American people will assert the old vigilante
+principle that a man's life, given him by God, and a man's property,
+earned by his own labor, are things he is entitled to defend or have
+defended. He never wholly delegates this right to any government. He may
+rescind his qualified delegation when he finds his chosen servants
+unfaithful or inefficient; and so have back again clean his own great
+and imperishable human rights. A wise law and one enforced is tolerable.
+An unjust and impure law is intolerable, and it is no wrong to cast
+off allegiance to it. If so, Magna Charta was wrong, and the American
+Revolution earth's greatest example of lynch law!
+
+[Illustration: "AFTERWARD"
+Fritz Graveyard, New Mexico. Many victims of the Lincoln County War
+buried here]
+
+Conclusions parallel to these are expressed by no less a citizen than
+Andrew D. White, long United States Minister to Germany, who, in the
+course of an address at a prominent university of America, in the year
+1906, made the following bold remarks:
+
+"There is a well-defined criminal class in all of our cities; a class of
+men who make crime a profession. Deaths by violence are increasing
+rapidly. Our record is now larger than any other country of the world.
+The number of homicides that are punished by lynching exceeds the number
+punished by due process of law. There is nothing more nonsensical or
+ridiculous than the goody-goody talk about lynching. Much may be said in
+favor of Goldwin Smith's quotation, that 'there are communities in which
+lynch law is better than any other.'
+
+"The pendulum has swung from extreme severity in the last century to
+extreme laxity in this century. There has sprung up a certain
+sentimental sympathy. In the word of a distinguished jurist, 'the
+taking of life for the highest crime after due process of law is the
+only taking of life which the American people condemn.'
+
+"In the next year 9,000 people will be murdered. As I stand here to-day
+I tell you that 9,000 are doomed to death with all the cruelty of the
+criminal heart, and with no regard for home and families; and two-thirds
+will be due to the maudlin sentiment sometimes called mercy.
+
+"I have no sympathy for the criminal. My sympathy is for those who will
+be murdered; for their families and for their children. This sham
+humanitarianism has become a stench. The cry now is for righteousness.
+The past generation has abolished human slavery. It is for the present
+to deal with the problems of the future, and among them this problem of
+crime."
+
+Against doctrine of this sort none will protest but the politicians in
+power, under whose lax administration of a great trust there has arisen
+one of the saddest spectacles of human history, the decay of the great
+American principles of liberty and fair play. The criminals of our city
+are bold, because they, if not ourselves, know of this decay. They, if
+not ourselves, know the weakness of that political system to which we
+have, in carelessness equaling that of the California miners of old--a
+carelessness based upon a madness of money equal to or surpassing that
+of the gold stampedes--delegated our sacred personal rights to live
+freely, to own property, and to protect each for himself his home.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Story of the Outlaw, by Emerson Hough
+
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Story of the Outlaw, by Emerson Hough
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Story of the Outlaw
+       A Study of the Western Desperado
+
+Author: Emerson Hough
+
+Release Date: January 17, 2008 [EBook #24342]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF THE OUTLAW ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by D. Alexander and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<h1>THE</h1>
+<h1>STORY OF THE OUTLAW</h1>
+
+<p class="center"><i>A STUDY OF THE WESTERN DESPERADO</i></p>
+
+<p class="center">WITH HISTORICAL NARRATIVES OF FAMOUS OUTLAWS;</p>
+<p class="center">THE STORIES OF NOTED BORDER WARS;</p>
+<p class="center">VIGILANTE MOVEMENTS AND ARMED</p>
+<p class="center">CONFLICTS ON THE FRONTIER</p>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+<h2>EMERSON HOUGH</h2>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 64px;">
+<img src="images/i001.jpg" width="64" height="60" alt="Publisher&#39;s Logo" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="center">NEW YORK</p>
+<p class="center">THE OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY</p>
+<p class="center">1907</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Copyright, 1905, by</span></p>
+<p class="center">THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Copyright, 1907, by</span></p>
+<p class="center">EMERSON HOUGH</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<p class="center">Entered at Stationers' Hall, London, England</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 15%;" />
+<p class="center"><i>All Rights Reserved</i></p>
+
+<p class="center">THE OUTING PRESS</p>
+<p class="center">DEPOSIT, N. Y.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="The_Story_of_the_Outlaw" id="The_Story_of_the_Outlaw"></a>The Story of the Outlaw</h2>
+
+<p><!-- Page iv --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_iv" id="Page_iv">[Pg iv]</a></span></p>
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 299px;">
+<img src="images/i004.jpg" width="299" height="450" alt="From a painting by John W. Norton
+PLUMMER&#39;S MEN HOLDING UP THE BANNACK STAGE
+(See page 119)" title="" /><a href="#Page_119">
+<span class="caption"><span style='font-size:small'>From a painting by John W. Norton</span><br />
+PLUMMER&#39;S MEN HOLDING UP THE BANNACK STAGE
+(See page 119)</span></a>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page v --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">[Pg v]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE"></a>PREFACE</h2>
+
+
+<p>In offering this study of the American desperado, the author constitutes
+himself no apologist for the acts of any desperado; yet neither does he
+feel that apology is needed for the theme itself. The outlaw, the
+desperado&mdash;that somewhat distinct and easily recognizable figure
+generally known in the West as the "bad man"&mdash;is a character unique in
+our national history, and one whose like scarcely has been produced in
+any land other than this. It is not necessary to promote absurd and
+melodramatic impressions regarding a type properly to be called
+historic, and properly to be handled as such. The truth itself is
+thrilling enough, and difficult as that frequently has been of
+discovery, it is the truth which has been sought herein.</p>
+
+<p>A thesis on the text of disregard for law might well be put to better
+use than to serve merely as exciting reading, fit to pass away an <!-- Page vi --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">[Pg vi]</a></span>idle
+hour. It might, and indeed it may&mdash;if the reader so shall choose&mdash;offer
+a foundation for wider arguments than those suggested in these pages,
+which deal rather with premises than conclusions. The lesson of our
+dealings with our bad men of the past can teach us, if we like, the best
+method of dealing with our bad men to-day.</p>
+
+<p>There are other lessons which we might take from an acquaintance with
+frontier methods of enforcing respect for the law; and the first of
+these is a practical method of handling criminals in the initial
+executive acts of the law. Never were American laws so strong as to-day,
+and never were our executive officers so weak. Our cities frequently are
+ridden with criminals or rioters. We set hundreds of policemen to
+restore order, but order is not restored. What is the average policeman
+as a criminal-taker? Cloddy and coarse of fiber, rarely with personal
+heredity of mental or bodily vigor, with no training at arms, with no
+sharp, incisive quality of nerve action, fat, unwieldy, unable to run a
+hundred yards and keep his breath, not skilled enough to kill his man
+even when he has him cornered, he is the archetype of all unseemliness
+as the agent of a law which to-day needs a sterner upholding <!-- Page vii --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span>than ever
+was the case in all our national life. We use this sort of tools in
+handling criminals, when each of us knows, or ought to know, that the
+city which would select twenty Western peace officers of the old type
+and set them to work without restrictions as to the size of their
+imminent graveyards, would free itself of criminals in three months'
+time, and would remain free so long as its methods remained in force.</p>
+
+<p>As for the subject-matter of the following work, it may be stated that,
+while attention has been paid to the great and well-known instances and
+epochs of outlawry, many of the facts given have not previously found
+their way into print. The story of the Lincoln County War of the
+Southwest is given truthfully for the first time, and after full
+acquaintance with sources of information now inaccessible or passing
+away. The Stevens County War of Kansas, which took place, as it were,
+but yesterday and directly at our doors, has had no history but a
+garbled one; and as much might be said of many border encounters whose
+chief use heretofore has been to curdle the blood in penny-dreadfuls.
+Accuracy has been sought among the confusing statements purporting to
+constitute the record <!-- Page viii --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span>in such historic movements as those of the
+"vigilantes" of California and Montana mining days, and of the later
+cattle days when "wars" were common between thieves and outlaws, and the
+representatives of law and order,&mdash;themselves not always duly
+authenticated officers of the law.</p>
+
+<p>No one man can have lived through the entire time of the American
+frontier; and any work of this kind must be in part a matter of
+compilation in so far as it refers to matters of the past. In all cases
+where practicable, however, the author has made up the records from
+stories of actual participants, survivors and eye-witnesses; and he is
+able in some measure to write of things and men personally known during
+twenty-five years of Western life. Captain Patrick F. Garrett, of New
+Mexico, central figure of the border fighting in that district in the
+early railroad days, has been of much service in extending the author's
+information on that region and time. Mr. Herbert M. Tonney, now of
+Illinois, tells his own story as a survivor of the typical county-seat
+war of Kansas, in which he was shot and left for dead. Many other men
+have offered valuable narratives.</p>
+
+<p>In dealing with any subject of early American <!-- Page ix --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span>history, there is no
+authority more incontestable than Mr. Alexander Hynds, of Dandridge,
+Tennessee, whose acquaintance with singular and forgotten bits of early
+frontier history borders upon the unique in its way. Neither does better
+authority exist than Hon. N. P. Langford, of Minnesota, upon all matters
+having to do with life in the Rocky Mountain region in the decade of
+1860-1870. He was an argonaut of the Rockies and a citizen of Montana
+and of other Western territories before the coming of the days of law.
+Free quotations are made from his graphic work, "Vigilante Days and
+Ways," which is both interesting of itself and valuable as a historical
+record.</p>
+
+<p>The stories of modern train-robbing bandits and outlaw gangs are taken
+partly from personal narratives, partly from judicial records, and
+partly from works frequently more sensational than accurate, and
+requiring much sifting and verifying in detail. Naturally, very many
+volumes of Western history and adventure have been consulted. Much of
+this labor has been one of love for the days and places concerned, which
+exist no longer as they once did. The total result, it is hoped, will
+aid in telling at least a portion of the story of the vivid and
+<!-- Page x --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[Pg x]</a></span>significant life of the West, and of that frontier whose van, if ever
+marked by human lawlessness, has, none the less, ever been led by the
+banner of human liberty. May that banner still wave to-day, and though
+blood be again the price, may it never permanently be replaced by that
+of license and injustice in our America.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page xi --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[Pg xi]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+<table border="0" width="70%" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="Contents">
+<tr>
+    <td align='right' style="width:15%;"><span style='font-size:small'>CHAPTER</span></td>
+    <td style="width:5%;">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td style="width:80%;">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td align='right' style="width:10%;"><span style='font-size:small'>PAGE</span></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="right">I</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Desperado</span></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_I">1</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="right">II</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Imitation Desperado</span></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_II">14</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="right">III</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Land of the Desperado</span></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_III">22</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="right">IV</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Early Outlaw</span></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_IV">35</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="right">V</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Vigilantes of California</span></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_V">74</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="right">VI</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Outlaw of the Mountains</span></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_VI">98</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="right">VII</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">Henry Plummer</span></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_VII">105</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="right">VIII</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">Boone Helm</span></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_VIII">127</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="right">IX</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">Death Scenes of Desperadoes</span></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_IX">137</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="right">X</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">Joseph A. Slade</span></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_X">145</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="right">XI</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Desperado of the Plains</span></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_XI">154</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="right">XII</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">Wild Bill Hickok</span></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_XII">167</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="right">XIII</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">Frontier Wars</span></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_XIII">187</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="right">XIV</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Lincoln County War</span></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_XIV">196</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="right">XV</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Stevens County War</span></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_XV">227</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="right">XVI</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">Biographies of Bad Men</span></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_XVI">256</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="right">XVII</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">The Fight of Buckshot Roberts</span></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_XVII">284</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="right">XVIII</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="left"><!-- Page xii --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[Pg xii]</a></span><span class="smcap">The Man Hunt</span></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_XVIII">292</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="right">XIX</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">Bad Men of Texas</span></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_XIX">313</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="right">XX</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">Modern Bad Men</span></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_XX">340</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="right">XXI</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">Bad Men of the Indian Nations</span></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_XXI">371</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="right">XXII</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="left"><span class="smcap">Desperadoes of the Cities</span></td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Chapter_XXII">393</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p><!-- Page xiii --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiii" id="Page_xiii">[Pg xiii]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="ILLUSTRATIONS" id="ILLUSTRATIONS"></a>ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+<table border="0" width="70%" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" summary="Contents">
+
+<tr>
+<td style="width:80%;">&nbsp;</td>
+<td align='right' style="width:30%;">FACING PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">Plummer's Men Holding Up the Bannack Stage</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#Page_iv"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">The Scene of Many Little Wars</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#i027">12</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">Types of Border Barricades</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#i053">36</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">The Scene of Many Hangings</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#i157">138</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">How the Rustler Worked</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#i185">164</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">Wild Bill Hickok's Desperate Fight</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#i196">172</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">John Simpson Chisum</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#i223">198</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">Men Prominent in the Lincoln County War</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#i245">218</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">The "Women in the Case"</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#i251">222</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">The McSween Store and Bank</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#i271">240</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">Billy the Kid</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#i291">258</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">"The Next Instant He Fired and Shot Ollinger Dead"</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#i307">272</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">Pat F. Garrett</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#i331">294</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="left"><!-- Page xiv --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiv" id="Page_xiv">[Pg xiv]</a></span>A Typical Western Man-Hunt</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#i341">302</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">The Old Chisum Ranch</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#i371">330</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">The Old Fritz Ranch</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#i401">358</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">A Border Fortress</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#i4012">358</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td align="left">"Afterward"</td>
+  <td align="right"><a href="#i443">398</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page 1 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Chapter_I" id="Chapter_I"></a>Chapter I</h2>
+
+<p>The Desperado&mdash;<i>Analysis of His Make-up</i>&mdash;<i>How the Desperado Got to Be
+Bad and Why</i>&mdash;<i>Some Men Naturally Skillful with Weapons</i>&mdash;<i>Typical
+Desperadoes</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p>Energy and action may be of two sorts, good or bad; this being as well
+as we can phrase it in human affairs. The live wires that net our
+streets are more dangerous than all the bad men the country ever knew,
+but we call electricity on the whole good in its action. We lay it under
+law, but sometimes it breaks out and has its own way. These outbreaks
+will occur until the end of time, in live wires and vital men. Each land
+in the world produces its own men individually bad&mdash;and, in time, other
+bad men who kill them for the general good.</p>
+
+<p>There are bad Chinamen, bad Filipinos, bad Mexicans, and Indians, and
+negroes, and bad <!-- Page 2 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span>white men. The white bad man is the worst bad man of
+the world, and the prize-taking bad man of the lot is the Western white
+bad man. Turn the white man loose in a land free of restraint&mdash;such as
+was always that Golden Fleece land, vague, shifting and transitory,
+known as the American West&mdash;and he simply reverts to the ways of
+Teutonic and Gothic forests. The civilized empire of the West has grown
+in spite of this, because of that other strange germ, the love of law,
+anciently implanted in the soul of the Anglo-Saxon. That there was
+little difference between the bad man and the good man who went out
+after him was frequently demonstrated in the early roaring days of the
+West. The religion of progress and civilization meant very little to the
+Western town marshal, who sometimes, or often, was a peace officer
+chiefly because he was a good fighting man.</p>
+
+<p>We band together and "elect" political representatives who do not
+represent us at all. We "elect" executive officers who execute nothing
+but their own wishes. We pay innumerable policemen to take from our
+shoulders the burden of self-protection; and the policemen do not do
+this thing. Back of all the law is the undelegated <!-- Page 3 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span>personal right, that
+vague thing which, none the less, is recognized in all the laws and
+charters of the world; as England and France of old, and Russia to-day,
+may show. This undelegated personal right is in each of us, or ought to
+be. If there is in you no hot blood to break into flame and set you
+arbiter for yourself in some sharp, crucial moment, then God pity you,
+for no woman ever loved you if she could find anything else to love, and
+you are fit neither as man nor citizen.</p>
+
+<p>As the individual retains an undelegated right, so does the body social.
+We employ politicians, but at heart most of us despise politicians and
+love fighting men. Society and law are not absolutely wise nor
+absolutely right, but only as a compromise relatively wise and right.
+The bad man, so called, may have been in large part relatively bad. This
+much we may say scientifically, and without the slightest cheapness. It
+does not mean that we shall waste any maudlin sentiment over a
+desperado; and certainly it does not mean that we shall have anything
+but contempt for the pretender at desperadoism.</p>
+
+<p>Who and what was the bad man? Scientifically and historically he was
+even as you and I. Whence did he come? From any and all places. <!-- Page 4 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>What
+did he look like? He came in all sorts and shapes, all colors and
+sizes&mdash;just as cowards do. As to knowing him, the only way was by trying
+him. His reputation, true or false, just or unjust, became, of course,
+the herald of the bad man in due time. The "killer" of a Western town
+might be known throughout the state or in several states. His reputation
+might long outlast that of able statesmen and public benefactors.</p>
+
+<p>What distinguished the bad man in peculiarity from his fellowman? Why
+was he better with weapons? What is courage, in the last analysis? We
+ought to be able to answer these questions in a purely scientific way.
+We have machines for photographing relative quickness of thought and
+muscular action. We are able to record the varying speeds of impulse
+transmission in the nerves of different individuals. If you were picking
+out a bad man, would you select one who, on the machine, showed a
+dilatory nerve response? Hardly. The relative fitness for a man to be
+"bad," to become extraordinarily quick and skillful with weapons, could,
+without doubt, be predetermined largely by these scientific
+measurements. Of course, having no thought-machines in the early West,
+they got at <!-- Page 5 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>the matter by experimenting, and so, very often, by a
+graveyard route. You could not always stop to feel the pulse of a
+suspected killer.</p>
+
+<p>The use of firearms with swiftness and accuracy was necessary in the
+calling of the desperado, after fate had marked him and set him apart
+for the inevitable, though possibly long-deferred, end. This skill with
+weapons was a natural gift in the case of nearly every man who attained
+great reputation whether as killer of victims or as killer of killers.
+Practice assisted in proficiency, but a Wild Bill or a Slade or a Billy
+the Kid was born and not made.</p>
+
+<p>Quickness in nerve action is usually backed with good digestion, and
+hard life in the open is good medicine for the latter. This, however,
+does not wholly cover the case. A slow man also might be a brave man.
+Sooner or later, if he went into the desperado business on either side
+of the game, he would fall before the man who was brave as himself and a
+fraction faster with the gun.</p>
+
+<p>There were unknown numbers of potential bad men who died mute and
+inglorious after a life spent at a desk or a plow. They might have been
+bad if matters had shaped right for that. Each war brings out its own
+heroes from unsuspected <!-- Page 6 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>places; each sudden emergency summons its own
+fit man. Say that a man took to the use of weapons, and found himself
+arbiter of life and death with lesser animals, and able to grant them
+either at a distance. He went on, pleased with his growing skill with
+firearms. He discovered that as the sword had in one age of the world
+lengthened the human arm, so did the six-shooter&mdash;that epochal
+instrument, invented at precisely that time of the American life when
+the human arm needed lengthening&mdash;extend and strengthen his arm, and
+make him and all men equal. The user of weapons felt his powers
+increased. So now, in time, there came to him a moment of danger. There
+was his enemy. There was the affront, the challenge. Perhaps it was male
+against male, a matter of sex, prolific always in bloodshed. It might be
+a matter of property, or perhaps it was some taunt as to his own
+personal courage. Perhaps alcohol came into the question, as was often
+the case. For one reason or the other, it came to the ordeal of combat.
+It was the undelegated right of one individual against that of another.
+The law was not invoked&mdash;the law would not serve. Even as the quicker
+set of nerves flashed into action, the <!-- Page 7 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>arm shot forward, and there
+smote the point of flame as did once the point of steel. The victim
+fell, his own weapon clutched in his hand, a fraction too late. The law
+cleared the killer. It was "self-defense." "It was an even break," his
+fellowmen said; although thereafter they were more reticent with him and
+sought him out less frequently.</p>
+
+<p>"It was an even break," said the killer to himself&mdash;"an even break, him
+or me." But, perhaps, the repetition of this did not serve to blot out a
+certain mental picture. I have had a bad man tell me that he killed his
+second man to get rid of the mental image of his first victim.</p>
+
+<p>But this exigency might arise again; indeed, most frequently did arise.
+Again the embryo bad man was the quicker. His self-approbation now,
+perhaps, began to grow. This was the crucial time of his life. He might
+go on now and become a bad man, or he might cheapen and become an
+imitation desperado. In either event, his third man left him still more
+confident. His courage and his skill in weapons gave him assuredness and
+ease at the time of an encounter. He was now becoming a specialist. Time
+did the rest, until at length they buried him.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 8 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span></p><p>The bad man of genuine sort rarely looked the part assigned to him in
+the popular imagination. The long-haired blusterer, adorned with a
+dialect that never was spoken, serves very well in fiction about the
+West, but that is not the real thing. The most dangerous man was apt to
+be quiet and smooth-spoken. When an antagonist blustered and threatened,
+the most dangerous man only felt rising in his own soul, keen and stern,
+that strange exultation which often comes with combat for the man
+naturally brave. A Western officer of established reputation once said
+to me, while speaking of a recent personal difficulty into which he had
+been forced: "I hadn't been in anything of that sort for years, and I
+wished I was out of it. Then I said to myself, 'Is it true that you are
+getting old&mdash;have you lost your nerve?' Then all at once the old feeling
+came over me, and I was just like I used to be. I felt calm and happy,
+and I laughed after that. I jerked my gun and shoved it into his
+stomach. He put up his hands and apologized. 'I will give you a hundred
+dollars now,' he said, 'if you will tell me where you got that gun.' I
+suppose I was a trifle quick for him."</p>
+
+<p>The virtue of the "drop" was eminently respected <!-- Page 9 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>among bad men.
+Sometimes, however, men were killed in the last desperate conviction
+that no man on earth was as quick as they. What came near being an
+incident of that kind was related by a noted Western sheriff.</p>
+
+<p>"Down on the edge of the Pecos valley," said he, "a dozen miles below
+old Fort Sumner, there used to be a little saloon, and I once captured a
+man there. He came in from somewhere east of our territory, and was
+wanted for murder. The reward offered for him was twelve hundred
+dollars. Since he was a stranger, none of us knew him, but the sheriff's
+descriptions sent in said he had a freckled face, small hands, and a red
+spot in one eye. I heard that there was a new saloon-keeper in there,
+and thought he might be the man, so I took a deputy and went down one
+day to see about it.</p>
+
+<p>"I told my deputy not to shoot until he saw me go after my gun. I didn't
+want to hold the man up unless he was the right one, and I wanted to be
+sure about that identification mark in the eye. Now, when a bartender is
+waiting on you, he will never look you in the face until just as you
+raise your glass to drink. I told my deputy that we would order a couple
+of drinks, and so get a chance to look this fellow <!-- Page 10 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span>in the eye. When he
+looked up, I did look him in the eye, and there was the red spot!</p>
+
+<p>"I dropped my glass and jerked my gun and covered him, but he just
+wouldn't put up his hands for a while. I didn't want to kill him, but I
+thought I surely would have to. He kept both of his hands resting on the
+bar, and I knew he had a gun within three feet of him somewhere. At last
+slowly he gave in. I treated him well, as I always did a prisoner, told
+him we would square it if we had made any mistake. We put irons on him
+and started for Las Vegas with him in a wagon. The next morning, out on
+the trail, he confessed everything to me. We turned him over, and later
+he was tried and hung. I always considered him to be a pretty bad man.
+So far as the result was concerned, he might about as well have gone
+after his gun. I certainly thought that was what he was going to do. He
+had sand. I could just see him stand there and balance the chances in
+his mind.</p>
+
+<p>"Another of the nerviest men I ever ran up against," the same officer
+went on, reflectively, "I met when I was sheriff of Dona A&ntilde;a county, New
+Mexico. I was in Las Cruces, when there came in a sheriff from over in
+the <!-- Page 11 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span>Indian Nations looking for a fugitive who had broken out of a
+penitentiary after killing a guard and another man or so. This sheriff
+told me that the criminal in question was the most desperate man he had
+ever known, and that no matter how we came on him, he would put up a
+fight and we would have to kill him before we could take him. We located
+our man, who was cooking on a ranch six or eight miles out of town. I
+told the sheriff to stay in town, because the man would know him and
+would not know us. I had a Mexican deputy along with me.</p>
+
+<p>"I put out my deputy on one side of the house and went in. I found my
+man just wiping his hands on a towel after washing his dishes. I threw
+down on him, and he answered by smashing me in the face, and then
+jumping through the window like a squirrel. I caught at him and tore the
+shirt off his back, but I didn't stop him. Then I ran out of the door
+and caught him on the porch. I did not want to kill him, so I struck him
+over the head with the handcuffs I had ready for him. He dropped, but
+came up like a flash, and struck me so hard with his fist that I was
+badly jarred. We fought hammer and tongs for a while, but at length <!-- Page 12 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>he
+broke away, sprang through the door, and ran down the hall. He was going
+to his room after his gun. At that moment my Mexican came in, and having
+no sentiment about it, just whaled away and shot him in the back,
+killing him on the spot. The doctors said when they examined this man's
+body that he was the most perfect physical specimen they had ever seen.
+I can testify that he was a fighter. The sheriff offered me the reward,
+but I wouldn't take any of it. I told him that I would be over in his
+country some time, and that I was sure he would do as much for me if I
+needed his help. I hope that if I do have to go after his particular
+sort of bad people, I'll be lucky in getting the first start on my man.
+That man was as desperate a fighter as I ever saw or expect to see. Give
+a man of that stripe any kind of a show and he's going to kill you,
+that's all. He knows that he has no chance under the law.</p>
+
+<p>"Sometimes they got away with desperate chances, too, as many a peace
+officer has learned to his cost. The only way to go after such a man is
+to go prepared, and then to give him no earthly show to get the best of
+you. I don't mean that an officer ought to shoot down a man if he has a
+show to take his prisoner alive; but I do mean that he ought to remember
+that he <!-- Page 13 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>may be pitted against a man who is just as brave as he is,
+and just as good with a gun, and who is fighting for his life."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"><a name="i027">
+<img src="images/i027.jpg" class="jpg" width="600" height="377" alt="THE SCENE OF MANY LITTLE WARS
+More men have been killed in this street than in any other in America" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE SCENE OF MANY LITTLE WARS</span></a></div>
+<p class="center">More men have been killed in this street than in any other in America</p>
+
+<p>Of course, such a man as this, whether confronted by an officer of the
+law or by another man against whom he has a personal grudge, or who has
+in any way challenged him to the ordeal of weapons, was steadfast in his
+own belief that he was as brave as any, and as quick with weapons. Thus,
+until at length he met his master in the law of human progress and
+civilization, he simply added to his own list of victims, or was added
+to the list of another of his own sort. For a very long time, moreover,
+there existed a great region on the frontier where the law could not
+protect. There was good reason, therefore, for a man's learning to
+depend upon his own courage and strength and skill. He had nothing else
+to protect him, whether he was good or bad. In the typical days of the
+Western bad man, life was the property of the individual, and not of
+society, and one man placed his life against another's as the only way
+of solving hard personal problems. Those days and those conditions
+brought out some of the boldest and most reckless men the earth ever
+saw. Before we freely criticize them, we ought fully to understand them.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page 14 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Chapter_II" id="Chapter_II"></a>Chapter II</h2>
+
+<p>The Imitation Desperado&mdash;<i>The Cheap "Long-Hair"</i>&mdash;<i>A Desperado in
+Appearance, a Coward at Heart</i>&mdash;<i>Some Desperadoes Who Did Not "Stand the
+Acid."</i></p>
+
+<p>The counterfeit bad man, in so far as he has a place in literature, was
+largely produced by Western consumptives for Eastern consumption.
+Sometimes he was in person manufactured in the East and sent West. It is
+easy to see the philosophical difference between the actual bad man of
+the West and the imitation article. The bad man was an evolution; the
+imitation bad man was an instantaneous creation, a supply arising full
+panoplied to fill a popular demand. Silently there arose, partly in the
+West and partly in the East, men who gravely and calmly proceeded to
+look the part. After looking the part for a time, to their own
+satisfaction at least, and after taking themselves <!-- Page 15 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>seriously as
+befitted the situation, they, in very many instances, faded away and
+disappeared in that Nowhere whence they came. Some of them took
+themselves too seriously for their own good. Of course, there existed
+for some years certain possibilities that any one of these bad men might
+run against the real thing.</p>
+
+<p>There always existed in the real, sober, level-headed West a contempt
+for the West-struck man who was not really bad, but who wanted to seem
+"bad." Singularly enough, men of this type were not so frequently local
+products as immigrants. The "bootblack bad man" was a character
+recognized on the frontier&mdash;the city tough gone West with ambitions to
+achieve a bad eminence. Some of these men were partially bad for a
+while. Some of them, no doubt, even left behind them, after their sudden
+funerals, the impression that they had been wholly bad. You cannot
+detect all the counterfeit currency in the world, severe as the test for
+counterfeits was in the old West. There is, of course, no great amount
+of difference between the West and the East. All America, as well as the
+West, demanded of its citizens nothing so much as genuineness. Yet the
+Western phrase, to "stand the acid," was not surpassed <!-- Page 16 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>in graphic
+descriptiveness. When an imitation bad man came into a town of the old
+frontier, he had to "stand the acid" or get out. His hand would be
+called by some one. "My friend," said old Bob Bobo, the famous
+Mississippi bear hunter, to a man who was doing some pretty loud
+talking, "I have always noticed that when a man goes out hunting for
+trouble in these bottoms, he almost always finds it." Two weeks later,
+this same loud talker threatened a calm man in simple jeans pants, who
+took a shotgun and slew him impulsively. Now, the West got its hot blood
+largely from the South, and the dogma of the Southern town was the same
+in the Western mining town or cow camp&mdash;the bad man or the would-be bad
+man had to declare himself before long, and the acid bottle was always
+close at hand.</p>
+
+<p>That there were grades in counterfeit bad men was accepted as a truth on
+the frontier. A man might be known as dangerous, as a murderer at heart,
+and yet be despised. The imitation bad man discovered that it is
+comparatively easy to terrify a good part of the population of a
+community. Sometimes a base imitation of a desperado is exalted in the
+public eye as the real article. A few years ago four misled hoodlums <!-- Page 17 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>of
+Chicago held up a street-car barn, killed two men, stole a sum of money,
+killed a policeman and another man, and took refuge in a dugout in the
+sand hills below the city, comporting themselves according to the most
+accepted dime-novel standards. Clumsily arrested by one hundred men or
+so, instead of being tidily killed by three or four, as would have been
+the case on the frontier, they were put in jail, given columns of
+newspaper notice, and worshiped by large crowds of maudlin individuals.
+These men probably died in the belief that they were "bad." They were
+not bad men, but imitations, counterfeit, and, indeed, nothing more than
+cheap and dirty little murderers.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, we all feel able to detect the mere notoriety hunter, who
+poses about in cheap pretentiousness; but now and then in the West there
+turned up something more difficult to understand. Perhaps the most
+typical case of imitation bad man ever known, at least in the Southwest,
+was Bob Ollinger, who was killed by Billy the Kid in 1881, when the
+latter escaped from jail at Lincoln, New Mexico. That Ollinger was a
+killer had been proved beyond the possibility of a doubt. He had no
+respect for human life, and those who knew him best knew that he <!-- Page 18 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>was a
+murderer at heart. His reputation was gained otherwise than through the
+severe test of an "even break." Some say that he killed Chavez, a
+Mexican, as he offered his own hand in greeting. He killed another man,
+Hill, in a similarly treacherous way. Later, when, as a peace officer,
+he was with a deputy, Pierce, serving a warrant on one Jones, he pulled
+his gun and, without need or provocation, shot Jones through. The same
+bullet, passing through Jones's body, struck Pierce in the leg and left
+him a cripple for life. Again, Ollinger was out as a deputy with a noted
+sheriff in pursuit of a Mexican criminal, who had taken refuge in a
+ditch. Ollinger wanted only to get into a position where he could shoot
+the man, but his superior officer crawled alone up the ditch, and,
+rising suddenly, covered his man and ordered him to surrender. The
+Mexican threw down his gun and said that he would surrender to the
+sheriff, but that he was sure Ollinger would kill him. This fear was
+justified. "When I brought out the man," said the sheriff, "Ollinger
+came up on the run, with his cocked six-shooter in his hand. His long
+hair was flying behind him as he ran, and I never in my life saw so
+devilish a look on any human being's <!-- Page 19 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>face. He simply wanted to shoot
+that Mexican, and he chased him around me until I had to tell him I
+would kill him if he did not stop." "Ollinger was a born murderer at
+heart," the sheriff added later. "I never slept out with him that I did
+not watch him. After I had more of a reputation, I think Ollinger would
+have been glad to kill me for the notoriety of it. I never gave him a
+chance to shoot me in the back or when I was asleep. Of course, you will
+understand that we had to use for deputies such material as we could
+get."</p>
+
+<p>Ollinger was the sort of imitation desperado that looks the part. He
+wore his hair long and affected the ultra-Western dress, which to-day is
+despised in the West. He was one of the very few men at that
+time&mdash;twenty-five years ago&mdash;who carried a knife at his belt. When he
+was in such a town as Las Vegas or Sante F&eacute;, he delighted to put on a
+buckskin shirt, spread his hair out on his shoulders, and to walk
+through the streets, picking his teeth with his knife, or once in a
+while throwing it in such a way that it would stick up in a tree or a
+board. He presented an eye-filling spectacle, and was indeed the ideal
+imitation bad man. This being the case, there may be interest <!-- Page 20 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>in
+following out his life to its close, and in noting how the bearing of
+the bad man's title sometimes exacted a very high price of the claimant.</p>
+
+<p>Ollinger, who had made many threats against Billy the Kid, was very
+cordially hated by the latter. Together with Deputy Bell, of White Oaks,
+Ollinger had been appointed to guard the Kid for two weeks previous to
+the execution of the death sentence which had been imposed upon the
+latter. The Kid did not want to harm Bell, but he dearly hated Ollinger,
+who never had lost an opportunity to taunt him. Watching his chance, the
+Kid at length killed both Bell and Ollinger, shooting the latter with
+Ollinger's own shotgun, with which Ollinger had often menaced his
+prisoner.</p>
+
+<p>Other than these two men, the Kid and Ollinger, I know of no better
+types each of his own class. One was a genuine bad man, and the other
+was the genuine imitation of a bad man. They were really as far apart as
+the poles, and they are so held in the tradition of that bloody country
+to-day. Throughout the West there are two sorts of wolves&mdash;the coyote
+and the gray wolf. Either will kill, and both are lovers of blood. One
+is yellow at heart, and the other <!-- Page 21 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>is game all the way through. In
+outward appearance both are wolves, and in appearance they sometimes
+grade toward each other so closely that it is hard to determine the
+species. The gray wolf is a warrior and is respected. The coyote is a
+sneak and a murderer, and his name is a term of reproach throughout the
+West.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page 22 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Chapter_III" id="Chapter_III"></a>Chapter III</h2>
+
+<p>The Land of the Desperado&mdash;<i>The Frontier of the Old West</i>&mdash;<i>The Great
+Unsettled Regions</i>&mdash;<i>The Desperado of the Mountains</i>&mdash;<i>His Brother of
+the Plains</i>&mdash;<i>The Desperado of the Early Railroad Towns</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p>There was once a vast empire, almost unknown, west of the Missouri
+river. The white civilization of this continent was three hundred years
+in reaching it. We had won our independence and taken our place among
+the nations of the world before our hardiest men had learned anything
+whatever of this Western empire. We had bought this vast region and were
+paying for it before we knew what we had purchased. The wise men of the
+East, leading men in Congress, said that it would be criminal to add
+this territory to our already huge domain, because it could never be
+settled. It was not dreamed that civilization <!-- Page 23 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>would ever really subdue
+it. Even much later, men as able as Daniel Webster deplored the attempt
+to extend our lines farther to the West, saying that these territories
+could not be States, that the East would suffer if we widened our West,
+and that the latter could never be of value to the union! So far as this
+great West was concerned, it was spurned and held in contempt, and it
+had full right to take itself as an outcast. Decreed to the wilderness
+forever, it could have been forgiven for running wild. Denominated as
+unfit for the occupation of the Eastern population, it might have been
+expected that it would gather to itself a population all its own.</p>
+
+<p>It did gather such a population, and in part that population was a
+lawless one. The frontier, clear across to the Pacific, has at one time
+or another been lawless; but this was not always the fault of the men
+who occupied the frontier. The latter swept Westward with such
+unexampled swiftness that the machinery of the law could not always keep
+up with them. Where there are no courts, where each man is judge and
+jury for himself, protecting himself and his property by his own arm
+alone, there always have gathered also the lawless, those who do not
+wish the day of law to come, men who want <!-- Page 24 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>license and not liberty, who
+wish crime and not lawfulness, who want to take what is not theirs and
+to enforce their own will in their own fashion.</p>
+
+<p>"There are two states of society perhaps equally bad for the promotion
+of good morals and virtue&mdash;the densely populated city and the
+wilderness. In the former, a single individual loses his identity in the
+mass, and, being unnoticed, is without the view of the public, and can,
+to a certain extent, commit crimes with impunity. In the latter, the
+population is sparse and, the strong arm of the law not being extended,
+his crimes are in a measure unobserved, or, if so, frequently power is
+wanting to bring him to justice. Hence, both are the resort of
+desperadoes. In the early settlement of the West, the borders were
+infested with desperadoes flying from justice, suspected or convicted
+felons escaped from the grasp of the law, who sought safety. The
+counterfeiter and the robber there found a secure retreat or a new
+theater for crime."</p>
+
+<p>The foregoing words were written in 1855 by a historian to whom the West
+of the trans-Missouri remained still a sealed book; but they cover very
+fitly the appeal of a wild and unknown <!-- Page 25 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>land to a bold, a criminal, or
+an adventurous population. Of the trans-Missouri as we of to-day think
+of it, no one can write more accurately and understandingly than
+Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States, who thus describes
+the land he knew and loved.<a name="FNanchor_A_1" id="FNanchor_A_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_A_1" class="fnanchor">[A]</a></p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"Some distance beyond the Mississippi, stretching from Texas to North
+Dakota, and westward to the Rocky mountains, lies the plains country.
+This is a region of light rainfall, where the ground is clad with short
+grass, while cottonwood trees fringe the courses of the winding plains
+streams; streams that are alternately turbid torrents and mere dwindling
+threads of water. The great stretches of natural pasture are broken by
+gray sage-brush plains, and tracts of strangely shaped and colored Bad
+Lands; sun-scorched wastes in summer, and in winter arctic in their iron
+desolation. Beyond the plains rise the Rocky mountains, their flanks
+covered with coniferous woods; but the trees are small, and do not
+ordinarily grow very close together. Toward the north the forest becomes
+denser, and the peaks higher; and glaciers <!-- Page 26 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>creep down toward the
+valleys from the fields of everlasting snow. The brooks are brawling,
+trout-filled torrents; the swift rivers roam over rapid and cataract, on
+their way to one or other of the two great oceans.</p>
+
+<p>"Southwest of the Rockies evil and terrible deserts stretch for leagues
+and leagues, mere waterless wastes of sandy plain and barren mountain,
+broken here and there by narrow strips of fertile ground. Rain rarely
+falls, and there are no clouds to dim the brazen sun. The rivers run in
+deep canyons, or are swallowed by the burning sand; the smaller
+watercourses are dry throughout the greater part of the year.</p>
+
+<p>"Beyond this desert region rise the sunny Sierras of California, with
+their flower-clad slopes and groves of giant trees; and north of them,
+along the coast, the rain-shrouded mountain chains of Oregon and
+Washington, matted with the towering growth of the mighty evergreen
+forest."</p></div>
+
+<p>Such, then, was this Western land, so long the home of the out-dweller
+who foreran civilization, and who sometimes took matters of the law into
+his own hands. For purposes of convenience, we may classify him as the
+bad man <!-- Page 27 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>of the mountains and the bad man of the plains; because he was
+usually found in and around the crude localities where raw resources in
+property were being developed; and because, previous to the advent of
+agriculture, the two vast wilderness resources were minerals and cattle.
+The mines of California and the Rockies; the cattle of the great
+plains&mdash;write the story of these and you have much of the story of
+Western desperadoism. For, in spite of the fact that the ideal desperado
+was one who did not rob or kill for gain, the most usual form of early
+desperadoism had to do with attempts at unlawfully acquiring another
+man's property.</p>
+
+<p>The discovery of gold in California caused a flood of bold men, good and
+bad, to pour into that remote region from all corners of the earth.
+Books could be written, and have been written, on the days of terror in
+California, when the Vigilantes took the law into their own hands. There
+came the time later when the rich placers of Montana and other
+territories were pouring out a stream of gold rivaling that of the days
+of '49; and when a tide of restless and reckless characters, resigning
+or escaping from both armies in the Civil War, mingled with many others
+who heard also the imperious call <!-- Page 28 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>of a land of gold, and rolled
+westward across the plains by every means of conveyance or locomotion
+then possible to man.</p>
+
+<p>The next great days of the wild West were the cattle days, which also
+reached their height soon after the end of the great war, when the North
+was seeking new lands for its young men, and the Southwest was hunting
+an outlet for the cattle herds, which had enormously multiplied while
+their owners were off at the wars. The cattle country had been passed
+over unnoticed by the mining men for many years, and dismissed as the
+Great American Desert, as it had been named by the first explorers, who
+were almost as ignorant about the West as Daniel Webster himself. Into
+this once barren land, a vast region unsettled and without law, there
+now came pouring up the great herds of cattle from the South, in charge
+of men wild as the horned kine they drove. Here was another great wild
+land that drew, as a magnet, wild men from all parts of the country.</p>
+
+<p>This last home of the bad man, the old cattle range, is covered by a
+passage from an earlier work:<a name="FNanchor_B_2" id="FNanchor_B_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_B_2" class="fnanchor">[B]</a></p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 29 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span></p>
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"The braiding of a hundred minor pathways, the Long Trail lay like a
+vast rope connecting the cattle country of the South with that of the
+North. Lying loose or coiling, it ran for more than two thousand miles
+along the eastern ridge of the Rocky mountains, sometimes close in at
+their feet, again hundreds of miles away across the hard table-lands or
+the well-flowered prairies. It traversed in a fair line the vast land of
+Texas, curled over the Indian Nations, over Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska,
+Wyoming and Montana, and bent in wide overlapping circles as far west as
+Utah and Nevada; as far east as Missouri, Iowa, Illinois; and as far
+north as the British possessions. Even to-day you may trace plainly its
+former course, from its faint beginnings in the lazy land of Mexico, the
+Ararat of the cattle range. It is distinct across Texas, and multifold
+still in the Indian lands. Its many intermingling paths still scar the
+iron surface of the Neutral Strip, and the plows have not buried all the
+old furrows in the plains of Kansas. Parts of the path still remain
+visible in the mountain lands of the far North. You may see the ribbons
+banding the hillsides to-day along the valley of the Stillwater, and
+along the Yellowstone and toward the source <!-- Page 30 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>of the Missouri. The hoof
+marks are beyond the Musselshell, over the Bad Lands and the <i>coulees</i>
+and the flat prairies; and far up into the land of the long cold you may
+see, even to-day if you like, the shadow of that unparalleled pathway,
+the Long Trail of the cattle range. History has no other like it.</p>
+
+<p>"This was really the dawning of the American cattle industry. The Long
+Trail now received a gradual but unmistakable extension, always to the
+north, and along the line of the intermingling of the products of the
+Spanish and the Anglo-Saxon civilizations. The thrust was always to the
+north. Chips and flakes of the great Southwestern herd began to be seen
+in the northern states. Meantime the Anglo-Saxon civilization was
+rolling swiftly toward the upper West. The Indians were being driven
+from the plains. A solid army was pressing behind the vanguard of
+soldier, scout and plainsman. The railroads were pushing out into a new
+and untracked empire. In 1871 over six hundred thousand cattle crossed
+the Red river for the Northern markets. Abilene, Newton, Wichita,
+Ellsworth, Great Bend, "Dodge," flared out into a swift and sometime
+evil blossoming. The Long Trail, which long ago had <!-- Page 31 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>found the black
+corn lands of Illinois and Missouri, now crowded to the West, until it
+had reached Utah and Nevada, and penetrated every open park and <i>mesa</i>
+and valley of Colorado, and found all the high plains of Wyoming.
+Cheyenne and Laramie became common words now, and drovers spoke wisely
+of the dangers of the Platte as a year before they had mentioned those
+of the Red river or the Arkansas. Nor did the Trail pause in its
+irresistible push to the north until it had found the last of the five
+great trans-continental lines, far in the British provinces. The Long
+Trail of the cattle range was done. By magic the cattle industry had
+spread over the entire West."</p></div>
+
+<p>By magic, also, the cattle industry called to itself a population unique
+and peculiar. Here were great values to be handled and guarded. The
+cowboy appeared, summoned out of the shadows by the demand of evolution.
+With him appeared also the cattle thief, making his living on free beef,
+as he had once on the free buffalo of the plains. The immense domain of
+the West was filled with property held under no better or more obvious
+mark than the imprint of a hot iron on the hide. There were no fences.
+The owner might be a thousand miles away. <!-- Page 32 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>The temptation to theft was
+continual and urgent. It seemed easy and natural to take a living from
+these great herds which no one seemed to own or to care for. The
+"rustler" of the range made his appearance, bold, hardy, unprincipled;
+and the story of his undoing by the law is precisely that of the finish
+of the robbers of the mines by the Vigilantes.</p>
+
+<p>Now, too, came the days of transition, which have utterly changed all
+the West. The railroad sprang across this great middle country of the
+plains. The intent was to connect the two sides of this continent; but,
+incidentally, and more swiftly than was planned, there was builded a
+great midway empire on the plains, now one of the grandest portions of
+America.</p>
+
+<p>This building of the trans-continental lines was a rude and dangerous
+work. It took out into the West mobs of hard characters, not afraid of
+hard work and hard living. These men would have a certain amount of
+money as wages, and would assuredly spend these wages as they made them;
+hence, the gambler followed the rough settlements at the "head of the
+rails." The murderer, the thief, the prostitute, the social outcast and
+the fleeing criminal went with the gamblers and the toughs. Those were
+<!-- Page 33 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>the days when it was not polite to ask a man what his name had been
+back in the States. A very large percentage of this population was wild
+and lawless, and it impressed those who joined it instead of being
+altered and improved by them. There were no wilder days in the West than
+those of the early railroad building. Such towns as Newton, Kansas,
+where eleven men were killed in one night; Fort Dodge, where armed
+encounters among cowboys and gamblers, deputies and desperadoes, were
+too frequent to attract attention; Caldwell, on the Indian border; Hays
+City, Abilene, Ellsworth&mdash;any of a dozen cow camps, where the head of
+the rails caught the great northern cattle drives, furnished chapters
+lurid enough to take volumes in telling&mdash;indeed, perhaps, gave that
+stamp to the West which has been apparently so ineradicable.</p>
+
+<p>These were flourishing times for the Western desperado, and he became
+famous, and, as it were, typical, at about this era. Perhaps this was
+due in part to the fact that the railroads carried with them the
+telegraph and the newspaper, so that records and reports were made of
+what had for many years gone unreported. Now, too, began the influx of
+transients, who <!-- Page 34 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>saw the wild West hurriedly and wrote of it as a
+strange and dangerous country. The wild citizens of California and
+Montana in mining days passed almost unnoticed except in fiction. The
+wild men of the middle plains now began to have a record in facts, or
+partial facts, as brought to the notice of the reading public which was
+seeking news of the new lands. A strange and turbulent day now drew
+swiftly on.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page 35 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Chapter_IV" id="Chapter_IV"></a>Chapter IV</h2>
+
+<p>The Early Outlaw&mdash;<i>The Frontier of the Past Century</i>&mdash;<i>The Bad Man East
+of the Mississippi River</i>&mdash;<i>The Great Western Land-Pirate, John A.
+Murrell</i>&mdash;<i>The Greatest Slave Insurrection Ever Planned</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p>Before passing to the review of the more modern days of wild life on the
+Western frontier, we shall find it interesting to note a period less
+known, but quite as wild and desperate as any of later times. Indeed, we
+might also say that our own desperadoes could take lessons from their
+ancestors of the past generation who lived in the forests of the
+Mississippi valley.</p>
+
+<p>Those were the days when the South was breaking over the Appalachians
+and exploring the middle and lower West. Adventurers were dropping down
+the old river roads and "traces" across Kentucky, Tennessee, and
+Mississippi, <!-- Page 36 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>into Louisiana and Texas. The flatboat and keel-boat days
+of the great rivers were at their height, and the population was in
+large part transient, migratory, and bold; perhaps holding a larger per
+cent. of criminals than any Western population since could claim. There
+were no organized systems of common carriers, no accepted roads and
+highways. The great National Road, from Wheeling west across Ohio,
+paused midway of Indiana. Stretching for hundreds of miles in each
+direction was the wilderness, wherein man had always been obliged to
+fend for himself. And, as ever, the wilderness had its own wild deeds.
+Flatboats were halted and robbed; caravans of travelers were attacked;
+lonely wayfarers plodding on horseback were waylaid and murdered. In
+short, the story of that early day shows our first frontiersman no
+novice in crime.</p>
+
+<p>About twenty miles below the mouth of the Wabash river, there was a
+resort of robbers such as might belong to the most lurid dime-novel
+list&mdash;the famous Cave-in-the-Rock, in the bank of the Ohio river. This
+cavern was about twenty-five feet in height at its visible opening, and
+it ran back into the bluff two hundred feet, with a width of eighty
+feet. The floor of this <!-- Page 37 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>natural cavern was fairly flat, so that it
+could be used as a habitation. From this lower cave a sort of aperture
+led up to a second one, immediately above it in the bluff wall, and
+these two natural retreats of wild animals offered attractions to wild
+men which were not unaccepted. It was here that there dwelt for some
+time the famous robber Meason, or Mason, who terrorized the flatboat
+trade of the Ohio at about 1800. Meason was a robber king, a giant in
+stature, and a man of no ordinary brains. He had associated with him his
+two sons and a few other hard characters, who together made a band
+sufficiently strong to attack any party of the size usually making up
+the boat companies of that time, or the average family traveling,
+mounted or on foot, through the forest-covered country of the Ohio
+valley. Meason killed and pillaged pretty much as he liked for a term of
+years, but as travel became too general along the Ohio, he removed to
+the wilder country south of that stream, and began to operate on the old
+"Natchez and Nashville Trace," one of the roadways of the South at that
+time, when the Indian lands were just opening to the early settlers.
+Lower Tennessee and pretty much all of Mississippi made his
+stamping-grounds, and <!-- Page 38 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>his name became a terror there, as it had been
+along the Ohio. The governor of the State of Mississippi offered a
+reward for his capture, dead or alive; but for a long time he escaped
+all efforts at apprehension. Treachery did the work, as it has usually
+in bringing such bold and dangerous men to book. Two members of his gang
+proved traitors to their chief. Seizing an opportunity they crept behind
+him and drove a tomahawk into his brain. They cut off the head and took
+it along as proof; but as they were displaying this at the seat of
+government, the town of Washington, they themselves were recognized and
+arrested, and were later tried and executed; which ended the Meason
+gang, one of the early and once famous desperado bands.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"><a name="i053">
+<img src="images/i053.jpg" class="jpg" width="600" height="362" alt="TYPES OF BORDER BARRICADES" title="" />
+<span class="caption">TYPES OF BORDER BARRICADES</span></a>
+</div>
+
+<p>From the earliest days there have been border counterfeiters of coin.
+One of the first and most remarkable was the noted Sturdevant, who lived
+in lower Illinois, near the Ohio river, in the first quarter of the last
+century. Sturdevant was also something of a robber king, for he could at
+any time wind his horn and summon to his side a hundred armed men. He
+was ostensibly a steady farmer, and lived comfortably, with a good corps
+of servants and tenants <!-- Page 39 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>about him; but his ablest assistants did not
+dwell so close to him. He had an army of confederates all over the
+middle West and South, and issued more counterfeit money than any man
+before, and probably than any man since. He always exacted a regular
+price for his money&mdash;sixteen dollars for a hundred in counterfeit&mdash;and
+such was the looseness of currency matters at that time that he found
+many willing to take a chance in his trade. He never allowed any
+confederate to pass a counterfeit bill in his own state, or in any other
+way to bring himself under the surveillance of local law; and they were
+all obliged to be especially circumspect in the county where they lived.
+He was a very smug sort of villain, in the trade strictly for revenue,
+and he was so careful that he was never caught by the law, in spite of
+the fact that it was known that his farm was the source of a flood of
+spurious money. He was finally "regulated" by the citizens, who arose
+and made him leave the country. This was one of the early applications
+of lynch law in the West. Its results were, as usual, salutary. There
+was no more counterfeiting in that region.</p>
+
+<p>A very noted desperado of these early days was Harpe, or Big Harpe, as
+he was called, to <!-- Page 40 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>distinguish him from his brother and associate,
+Little Harpe. Big Harpe made a wide region of the Ohio valley dangerous
+to travelers. The events connected with his vicious life are thus given
+by that always interesting old-time chronicler, Henry Howe:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"In the fall of the year 1801 or 1802, a company consisting of two men
+and three women arrived in Lincoln county, Ky., and encamped about a
+mile from the present town of Stanford. The appearance of the
+individuals composing this party was wild and rude in the extreme. The
+one who seemed to be the leader of the band was above the ordinary
+stature of men. His frame was bony and muscular, his breast broad, his
+limbs gigantic. His clothing was uncouth and shabby, his exterior
+weather-beaten and dirty, indicating continual exposure to the elements,
+and designating him as one who dwelt far from the habitations of men,
+and mingled not in the courtesies of civilized life. His countenance was
+bold and ferocious, and exceedingly repulsive, from its strongly marked
+expression of villainy. His face, which was larger than ordinary,
+exhibited the lines of ungovernable passion, and the complexion
+announced that the ordinary feelings of the <!-- Page 41 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>human breast were in him
+extinguished. Instead of the healthy hue which indicates the social
+emotions, there was a livid, unnatural redness, resembling that of a
+dried and lifeless skin. His eye was fearless and steady, but it was
+also artful and audacious, glaring upon the beholder with an unpleasant
+fixedness and brilliancy, like that of a ravenous animal gloating on its
+prey. He wore no covering on his head, and the natural protection of
+thick, coarse hair, of a fiery redness, uncombed and matted, gave
+evidence of long exposure to the rudest visitations of the sunbeam and
+the tempest. He was armed with a rifle, and a broad leathern belt, drawn
+closely around his waist, supported a knife and a tomahawk. He seemed,
+in short, an outlaw, destitute of all the nobler sympathies of human
+nature, and prepared at all points of assault or defense. The other man
+was smaller in size than him who lead the party, but similarly armed,
+having the same suspicious exterior, and a countenance equally fierce
+and sinister. The females were coarse and wretchedly attired.</p>
+
+<p>"These men stated in answer to the inquiry of the inhabitants, that
+their name was Harpe, and that they were emigrants from North Carolina.
+<!-- Page 42 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>They remained at their encampment the greater part of two days and a
+night, spending the time in rioting, drunkenness and debauchery. When
+they left, they took the road leading to Green river. The day succeeding
+their departure, a report reached the neighborhood that a young
+gentleman of wealth from Virginia, named Lankford, had been robbed and
+murdered on what was then called and is still known as the "Wilderness
+Road," which runs through the Rock-castle hills. Suspicion immediately
+fixed upon the Harpes as the perpetrators, and Captain Ballenger at the
+head of a few bold and resolute men, started in pursuit. They
+experienced great difficulty in following their trail, owing to a heavy
+fall of snow, which obliterated most of their tracks, but finally came
+upon them while encamped in a bottom on Green river, near the spot where
+the town of Liberty now stands. At first they made a show of resistance,
+but upon being informed that if they did not immediately surrender, they
+would be shot down, they yielded themselves prisoners. They were brought
+back to Stanford, and there examined. Among their effects were found
+some fine linen shirts, marked with the initials of Lankford. One had
+been pierced by a bullet <!-- Page 43 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>and was stained with blood. They had also a
+considerable sum of money in gold. It was afterward ascertained that
+this was the kind of money Lankford had with him. The evidence against
+them being thus conclusive, they were confined in the Stanford jail, but
+were afterward sent for trial to Danville, where the district court was
+in session. Here they broke jail, and succeeded in making their escape.</p>
+
+<p>"They were next heard of in Adair county, near Columbia. In passing
+through the country, they met a small boy, the son of Colonel Trabue,
+with a pillow-case of meal or flour, an article they probably needed.
+This boy, it is supposed they robbed and then murdered, as he was never
+afterward heard of. Many years afterward human bones answering the size
+of Colonel Trabue's son at the time of his disappearance, were found in
+a sink hole near the place where he was said to have been murdered.</p>
+
+<p>"The Harpes still shaped their course toward the mouth of Green river,
+marking their path by murders and robberies of the most horrible and
+brutal character. The district of country through which they passed was
+at that time very thinly settled, and from this reason, their outrages
+went unpunished. They seemed inspired <!-- Page 44 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>with the deadliest hatred against
+the whole human race, and such was their implacable misanthropy, that
+they were known to kill where there was no temptation to rob. One of
+their victims was a little girl, found at some distance from her home,
+whose tender age and helplessness would have been protection against any
+but incarnate fiends. The last dreadful act of barbarity, which led to
+their punishment and expulsion from the country, exceeded in atrocity
+all the others.</p>
+
+<p>"Assuming the guise of Methodist preachers, they obtained lodgings one
+night at a solitary house on the road. Mr. Stagall, the master of the
+house, was absent, but they found his wife and children, and a stranger,
+who, like themselves, had stopped for the night. Here they conversed and
+made inquiries about the two noted Harpes who were represented as
+prowling about the country. When they retired to rest, they contrived to
+secure an axe, which they carried with them into their chamber. In the
+dead of night, they crept softly down stairs, and assassinated the whole
+family, together with the stranger, in their sleep, and then setting
+fire to the house, made their escape. When Stagall returned, he found no
+wife to welcome him; <!-- Page 45 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>no home to receive him. Distracted with grief and
+rage, he turned his horse's head from the smoldering ruins, and repaired
+to the house of Captain John Leeper. Leeper was one of the most powerful
+men in his day, and fearless as powerful. Collecting four or five men
+well armed, they mounted and started in pursuit of vengeance. It was
+agreed that Leeper should attack 'Big Harpe,' leaving 'Little Harpe' to
+be disposed of by Stagall. The others were to hold themselves in
+readiness to assist Leeper and Stagall, as circumstances might require.</p>
+
+<p>"This party found the women belonging to the Harpes, attending to their
+little camp by the roadside; the men having gone aside into the woods to
+shoot an unfortunate traveler, of the name of Smith, who had fallen into
+their hands, and whom the women had begged might not be dispatched
+before their eyes. It was this halt that enabled the pursuers to
+overtake them. The women immediately gave the alarm, and the miscreants
+mounting their horses, which were large, fleet and powerful, fled in
+separate directions. Leeper singled out the 'Big Harpe,' and being
+better mounted than his companions, soon left them far behind. 'Little
+Harpe' succeeded in escaping from Stagall, and he, <!-- Page 46 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>with the rest of his
+companions, turned and followed on the track of Leeper and the 'Big
+Harpe.' After a chase of about nine miles, Leeper came within gun-shot
+of the latter and fired. The ball entering his thigh, passed through it
+and penetrated his horse and both fell. Harpe's gun escaped from his
+hand and rolled some eight or ten feet down the bank. Reloading his
+rifle, Leeper ran to where the wounded outlaw lay weltering in his
+blood, and found him with one thigh broken, and the other crushed
+beneath his horse. Leeper rolled the horse away, and set Harpe in an
+easier position. The robber begged that he might not be killed. Leeper
+told him that he had nothing to fear from him, but that Stagall was
+coming up, and could not probably be restrained. Harpe appeared very
+much frightened at hearing this, and implored Leeper to protect him. In
+a few moments, Stagall appeared, and without uttering a word, raised his
+rifle and shot Harpe through the head. They then severed the head from
+the body, and stuck it upon a pole where the road crosses the creek,
+from which the place was then named and is yet called Harpe's Head. Thus
+perished one of the boldest and most noted freebooters that has ever
+appeared in America. <!-- Page 47 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>Save courage, he was without one redeeming
+quality, and his death freed the country from a terror which had long
+paralyzed its boldest spirits.</p>
+
+<p>"The 'Little Harpe' afterward joined the band of Meason, and became one
+of his most valuable assistants in the dreadful trade of robbery and
+murder. He was one of the two bandits that, tempted by the reward for
+their leader's head, murdered him, and eventually themselves suffered
+the penalty of the law as previously related."</p></div>
+
+<p>Thus it would seem that the first quarter of the last century on the
+frontier was not without its own interest. The next decade, or that
+ending about 1840, however, offered a still greater instance of
+outlawry, one of the most famous ones indeed of American history,
+although little known to-day. This had to do with that genius in crime,
+John A. Murrell, long known as the great Western land-pirate; and surely
+no pirate of the seas was ever more enterprising or more dangerous.</p>
+
+<p>Murrell was another man who, in a decent walk of life, would have been
+called great. He had more than ordinary energy and intellect. He was not
+a mere brute, but a shrewd, cunning, <!-- Page 48 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>scheming man, hesitating at no
+crime on earth, yet animated by a mind so bold that mere personal crime
+was not enough for him. When it is added that he had a gang of robbers
+and murderers associated with him who were said to number nearly two
+thousand men, and who were scattered over the entire South below the
+Ohio river, it may be seen how bold were his plans; and his ability may
+further be shown in the fact that for years these men lived among and
+mingled with their fellows in civil life, unknown and unsuspected. Some
+of them were said to have been of the best families of the land; and
+even yet there come to light strange and romantic tales, perhaps not
+wholly true, of death-bed confessions of men prominent in the South who
+admitted that once they belonged to Murrell's gang, but had later
+repented and reformed. A prominent Kentucky lawyer was one of these.</p>
+
+<p>Murrell and his confederates would steal horses and mules, or at least
+the common class, or division, known as the "strikers," would do so,
+although the members of the Grand Council would hardly stoop to so petty
+a crime. For them was reserved the murdering of travelers or settlers
+who were supposed to have money, and the larger operations of negro
+stealing.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 49 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span></p><p>The theft of slaves, the claiming of the runaway rewards, the later
+re-stealing and re-selling and final killing of the negro in order to
+destroy the evidence, are matters which Murrell reduced to a system that
+has no parallel in the criminal records of the country. But not even
+here did this daring outlaw pause. It was not enough to steal a negro
+here and there, and to make a few thousand dollars out of each negro so
+handled. The whole state of organized society was to be overthrown by
+means of this same black population. So at least goes one story of his
+life. We know of several so-called black insurrections that were planned
+at one time or another in the South&mdash;as, for instance, the Turner
+insurrection in Virginia; but this Murrell enterprise was the biggest of
+them all.</p>
+
+<p>The plan was to have the uprising occur all over the South on the same
+day, Christmas of 1835. The blacks were to band together and march on
+the settlements, after killing all the whites on the farms where they
+worked. There they were to fall under the leadership of Murrell's
+lieutenants, who were to show them how to sack the stores, to kill the
+white merchants, and take the white women. The banks of all the Southern
+towns were to become the property <!-- Page 50 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>of Murrell and his associates. In
+short, at one stroke, the entire system of government, which had been
+established after such hard effort in that fierce wilderness along the
+old Southern "traces," was to be wiped out absolutely. The land was
+indeed to be left without law. The entire fruits of organized society
+were to belong to a band of outlaws. This was probably the best and
+boldest instance ever seen of the narrowness of the line dividing
+society and savagery.</p>
+
+<p>Murrell was finally brought to book by his supposed confederate, Virgil
+A. Stewart, the spy, who went under the name of Hues, whose evidence,
+after many difficulties, no doubt resulted in the breaking up of this,
+the largest and most dangerous band of outlaws this country ever saw;
+although Stewart himself was a vain and ambitious notoriety seeker.
+Supposing himself safe, Murrell gave Stewart a detailed story of his
+life. This was later used in evidence against him; and although
+Stewart's account needs qualification, it is the best and fullest record
+obtainable to-day.<a name="FNanchor_C_3" id="FNanchor_C_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_C_3" class="fnanchor">[C]</a></p>
+
+<p>"I was born in Middle Tennessee," Murrell <!-- Page 51 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>personally stated. "My
+parents had not much property, but they were intelligent people; and my
+father was an honest man I expect, and tried to raise me honest, but I
+think none the better of him for that. My mother was of the pure grit;
+she learned me and all her children to steal as soon as we could walk
+and would hide for us whenever she could. At ten years old I was not a
+bad hand. The first good haul I made was from a pedler who lodged at my
+father's house one night.</p>
+
+<p>"I began to look after larger spoils and ran several fine horses. By the
+time I was twenty I began to acquire considerable character, and
+concluded to go off and do my speculation where I was not known, and go
+on a larger scale; so I began to see the value of having friends in this
+business. I made several associates; I had been acquainted with some old
+hands for a long time, who had given me the names of some royal fellows
+between Nashville and Tuscaloosa, and between Nashville and Savannah in
+the state of Georgia and many other places. Myself and a fellow by the
+name of Crenshaw gathered four good horses and started for Georgia. We
+got in company with a young South Carolinian just before we reached
+Cumberland Mountain, <!-- Page 52 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>and Crenshaw soon knew all about his business. He
+had been to Tennessee to buy a drove of hogs, but when he got there pork
+was dearer than he calculated, and he declined purchasing. We concluded
+he was a prize. Crenshaw winked at me; I understood his idea. Crenshaw
+had traveled the road before, but I never had; we had traveled several
+miles on the mountain, when we passed near a great precipice; just
+before we passed it, Crenshaw asked me for my whip, which had a pound of
+lead in the butt; I handed it to him, and he rode up by the side of the
+South Carolinian, and gave him a blow on the side of the head, and
+tumbled him from his horse; we lit from our horses and fingered his
+pockets; we got twelve hundred and sixty-two dollars. Crenshaw said he
+knew of a place to hide him, and gathered him under the arms, and I by
+his feet, and conveyed him to a deep crevice in the brow of the
+precipice, and tumbled him into it; he went out of sight. We then
+tumbled in his saddle, and took his horse with us, which was worth two
+hundred dollars. We turned our course for South Alabama, and sold our
+horse for a good price. We frolicked for a week or more and were the
+highest larks you ever saw. We commenced <!-- Page 53 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>sporting and gambling, and
+lost every cent of our money.</p>
+
+<p>"We were forced to resort to our profession for a second raise. We stole
+a negro man, and pushed for Mississippi. We had promised him that we
+would conduct him to a free state if he would let us sell him once as we
+went on our way; we also agreed to give him part of the money. We sold
+him for six hundred dollars; but, when we went to start, the negro
+seemed to be very uneasy, and appeared to doubt our coming back for him
+as we had promised. We lay in a creek bottom, not far from the place
+where we had sold the negro, all the next day, and after dark we went to
+the china-tree in the lane where we were to meet Tom; he had been
+waiting for some time. He mounted his horse, and we pushed with him a
+second time. We rode twenty miles that night to the house of a friendly
+speculator. I had seen him in Tennessee, and had given him several
+lifts. He gave me his place of residence, that I might find him when I
+was passing. He is quite rich, and one of the best kind of fellows. Our
+horses were fed as much as they would eat, and two of them were
+foundered the next morning. We were detained a few days, and during that
+time <!-- Page 54 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>our friend went to a little village in the neighborhood, and saw
+the negro advertised, with a description of the two men of whom he had
+been purchased, and with mention of them as suspicious personages. It
+was rather squally times, but any port in a storm; we took the negro
+that night to the bank of a creek which runs by the farm of our friend,
+and Crenshaw shot him through the head. We took out his entrails and
+sunk him in the creek; our friend furnished us with one fine horse, and
+we left him our foundered horses. We made our way through the Choctaw
+and Chickasaw Nations, and then to Williamson county, in this state. We
+should have made a fine trip if we had taken care of all we got.</p>
+
+<p>"I had become a considerable libertine, and when I returned home I spent
+a few months rioting in all the luxuries of forbidden pleasures with the
+girls of my acquaintance. My stock of cash was soon gone, and I put to
+my shift for more. I commenced with horses, and ran several from the
+adjoining counties. I had got associated with a young man who had
+professed to be a preacher among the Methodists, and a sharper he was;
+he was as slick on the tongue as goose-grease. I took my first lessons
+<!-- Page 55 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>in divinity from this young preacher. He was highly respected by all
+who knew him, and well calculated to please; he first put me in the
+notion of preaching, to aid me in my speculations.</p>
+
+<p>"I got into difficulty about a mare that I had taken, and was imprisoned
+for near three years. I shifted it from court to court, but was at last
+found guilty, and whipped. During my confinement I read the scriptures,
+and became a good judge of theology. I had not neglected the criminal
+laws for many years before that time. When they turned me loose I was
+prepared for anything; I wanted to kill all but those of my own grit;
+and I will die by the side of one of them before I will desert.</p>
+
+<p>"My next speculation was in the Choctaw region; myself and brother stole
+two fine horses, and made our way into this country. We got in with an
+old negro man and his wife, and three sons, to go off with us to Texas,
+and promised them that, if they would work for us one year after we got
+there, we would let them go free, and told them many fine stories. The
+old negro became suspicious that we were going to sell him, and grew
+quite contrary; so we landed one day by the side of an island, and I
+requested him to go with me round the point <!-- Page 56 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>of the island to hunt a
+good place to catch some fish. After we were hidden from our company I
+shot him through the head, and then ripped open his belly and tumbled
+him into the river. I returned to my company, and told them that the
+negro had fallen into the river, and that he never came up after he went
+under. We landed fifty miles above New Orleans, and went into the
+country and sold our negroes to a Frenchman for nineteen hundred
+dollars.</p>
+
+<p>"We went from where we sold the negroes to New Orleans, and dressed
+ourselves like young lords. I mixed with the loose characters at the
+<i>swamp</i> every night. One night, as I was returning to the tavern where I
+boarded, I was stopped by two armed men, who demanded my money. I handed
+them my pocketbook, and observed that I was very happy to meet with
+them, as we were all of the same profession. One of them observed, 'D&mdash;d
+if I ever rob a brother chip. We have had our eyes on you and the man
+that has generally come with you for several nights; we saw so much
+rigging and glittering jewelry, that we concluded you must be some
+wealthy dandy, with a surplus of cash; and had determined to rid you of
+the trouble of some of it; but, if you are a robber, here is <!-- Page 57 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>your
+pocketbook, and you must go with us to-night, and we will give you an
+introduction to several fine fellows of the block; but stop, do you
+understand this motion?' I answered it, and thanked them for their
+kindness, and turned with them. We went to old Mother Surgick's, and had
+a real frolic with her girls. That night was the commencement of my
+greatness in what the world calls villainy. The two fellows who robbed
+me were named Haines and Phelps; they made me known to all the
+speculators that visited New Orleans, and gave me the name of every
+fellow who would speculate that lived on the Mississippi river, and many
+of its tributary streams, from New Orleans up to all the large Western
+cities.</p>
+
+<p>"I had become acquainted with a Kentuckian, who boarded at the same
+tavern I did, and I suspected he had a large sum of money; I felt an
+inclination to count it for him before I left the city; so I made my
+notions known to Phelps and my other new comrades, and concerted our
+plan. I was to get him off to the <i>swamp</i> with me on a spree, and when
+we were returning to our lodgings, my friends were to meet us and rob us
+both. I had got very intimate with the Kentuckian, and he thought me one
+of the best <!-- Page 58 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>fellows in the world. He was very fond of wine; and I had
+him well fumed with good wine before I made the proposition for a
+frolic. When I invited him to walk with me he readily accepted the
+invitation. We cut a few shines with the girls, and started to the
+tavern. We were met by a band of robbers, and robbed of all our money.
+The Kentuckian was so mad that he cursed the whole city, and wished that
+it would all be deluged in a flood of water so soon as he left the
+place. I went to my friends the next morning, and got my share of the
+spoil money, and my pocketbook that I had been robbed of. We got seven
+hundred and fifty dollars of the bold Kentuckian, which was divided
+among thirteen of us.</p>
+
+<p>"I commenced traveling and making all the acquaintances among the
+speculators that I could. I went from New Orleans to Cincinnati, and
+from there I visited Lexington, in Kentucky. I found a speculator about
+four miles from Newport, who furnished me with a fine horse the second
+night after I arrived at his house. I went from Lexington to Richmond,
+in Virginia, and from there I visited Charleston, in the State of South
+Carolina; and from thence to Milledgeville, by the way of Savannah <!-- Page 59 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>and
+Augusta, in the State of Georgia. I made my way from Milledgeville to
+Williamson county, the old stamping-ground. In all the route I only
+robbed eleven men but I preached some fine sermons, and scattered some
+counterfeit United States paper among my brethren.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>"After I returned home from the first grand circuit I made among my
+speculators, I remained there but a short time, as I could not rest when
+my mind was not actively engaged in some speculation. I commenced the
+foundation of this mystic clan on that tour, and suggested the plan of
+exciting a rebellion among the negroes, as the sure road to an
+inexhaustible fortune to all who would engage in the expedition. The
+first mystic sign which is used by this clan was in use among robbers
+before I was born; and the second had its origin from myself, Phelps,
+Haines, Cooper, Doris, Bolton, Harris, Doddridge, Celly, Morris, Walton,
+Depont, and one of my brothers, on the second night after my
+acquaintance with them in New Orleans. We needed a higher order to carry
+on our designs, and we adopted our sign, and called it the sign of the
+Grand Council of <!-- Page 60 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>the Mystic Clan; and practised ourselves to give and
+receive the new sign to a fraction before we parted; and, in addition to
+this improvement, we invented and formed a mode of corresponding, by
+means of ten characters, mixed with other matter, which has been very
+convenient on many occasions, and especially when any of us get into
+difficulties. I was encouraged in my new undertaking, and my heart began
+to beat high with the hope of being able one day to visit the pomp of
+the Southern and Western people in my vengeance; and of seeing their
+cities and towns one common scene of devastation, smoked walls and
+fragments.</p>
+
+<p>"I decoyed a negro man from his master in Middle Tennessee, and sent him
+to Mill's Point by a young man, and I waited to see the movements of the
+owner. He thought his negro had run off. So I started to take possession
+of my prize. I got another friend at Mill's Point to take my negro in a
+skiff, and convey him to the mouth of Red river, while I took passage on
+a steamboat. I then went through the country by land, and sold my negro
+for nine hundred dollars, and the second night after I sold him I stole
+him again, and my friend ran him to the Irish bayou in Texas; I
+<!-- Page 61 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>followed on after him, and sold my negro in Texas for five hundred
+dollars. I then resolved to visit South America, and see if there was an
+opening in that country for a speculation; I had also concluded that I
+could get some strong friends in that quarter to aid me in my designs
+relative to a negro rebellion; but of all people in the world, the
+Spaniards are the most treacherous and cowardly; I never want them
+concerned in any matter with me; I had rather take the negroes in this
+country to fight than a Spaniard. I stopped in a village, and passed as
+a doctor, and commenced practising medicine. I could ape the doctor
+first-rate, having read Ewel, and several other works on primitive
+medicine. I became a great favorite of an old Catholic; he adopted me as
+his son in the faith, and introduced me to all the best families as a
+young doctor from North America. I had been with the old Catholic but a
+very short time before I was a great Roman Catholic, and bowed to the
+cross, and attended regularly to all the ceremonies of that persuasion;
+and, to tell you the fact, Hues, all the Catholic religion needs to be
+universally received, is to be correctly represented; but you know I
+care nothing for religion. I had been with the old <!-- Page 62 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>Catholic about three
+months, and was getting a heavy practice, when an opportunity offered
+for me to rob the good man's secretary of nine hundred and sixty dollars
+in gold, and I could have got as much more in silver if I could have
+carried it. I was soon on the road for home again; I stopped three weeks
+in New Orleans as I came home, and had some high fun with old Mother
+Surgick's girls.</p>
+
+<p>"I collected all my associates in New Orleans at one of my friend's
+houses in that place, and we sat in council three days before we got all
+our plans to our notion; we then determined to undertake the rebellion
+at every hazard, and make as many friends as we could for that purpose.
+Every man's business being assigned him, I started for Natchez on foot.
+Having sold my horse in New Orleans with the intention of stealing
+another after I started, I walked four days, and no opportunity offered
+for me to get a horse. The fifth day, about twelve o'clock, I had become
+very tired, and stopped at a creek to get some water and rest a little.
+While I was sitting on a log, looking down the road I had come, a man
+came in sight riding a good-looking horse. The very moment I saw him I
+determined to have his horse <!-- Page 63 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>if he was in the garb of a traveler. He
+rode up, and I saw from his equipage that he was a traveler. I arose
+from my seat and drew an elegant rifle pistol on him, and ordered him to
+dismount. He did so, and I took his horse by the bridle, and pointed
+down the creek, and ordered him to walk before me. We went a few hundred
+yards and stopped. I hitched his horse, then made him undress himself,
+all to his shirt and drawers, and ordered him to turn his back to me. He
+asked me if I was going to shoot him. I ordered him the second time to
+turn his back to me. He said, 'If you are determined to kill me, let me
+have time to pray before I die.' I told him I had no time to hear him
+pray. He turned round and dropped on his knees, and I shot him through
+the back of the head. I ripped open his belly, and took out his
+entrails, and sunk him in the creek. I then searched his pockets, and
+found four hundred and one dollars and thirty-seven cents, and a number
+of papers that I did not take time to examine. I sunk the pocketbook and
+papers and his hat in the creek. His boots were brand new, and fitted me
+very genteelly, and I put them on, and sunk my old shoes in the creek to
+atone for them. I rolled up his clothes and <!-- Page 64 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>put them into his
+portmanteau, as they were quite new cloth of the best quality. I mounted
+as fine a horse as ever I straddled, and directed my course to Natchez
+in much better style than I had been for the last five days.</p>
+
+<p>"I reached Natchez, and spent two days with my friends at that place and
+the girls under the Hill together. I then left Natchez for the Choctaw
+nation, with the intention of giving some of them a chance for their
+property. As I was riding along between Benton and Rankin, planning for
+my designs, I was overtaken by a tall and good-looking young man, riding
+an elegant horse, which was splendidly rigged off; and the young
+gentleman's apparel was of the gayest that could be had, and his
+watch-chain and other jewelry were of the richest and best. I was
+anxious to know if he intended to travel through the Choctaw nation, and
+soon managed to learn. He said he had been to the lower country with a
+drove of negroes, and was returning home to Kentucky. We rode on, and
+soon got very intimate for strangers, and agreed to be company through
+the Indian nation. We were two fine-looking men, and, to hear us talk,
+we were very rich. I felt him on the subject of speculation, but he
+cursed the <!-- Page 65 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>speculators, and said he was in a bad condition to fall into
+the hands of such villains, as he had the cash with him that twenty
+negroes had sold for; and that he was very happy that he happened to get
+in company with me through the nation. I concluded he was a noble prize,
+and longed to be counting his cash. At length we came into one of those
+long stretches in the Nation, where there was no house for twenty miles,
+on the third day after we had been in company with each other. The
+country was high, hilly, and broken, and no water; just about the time I
+reached the place where I intended to count my companion's cash, I
+became very thirsty, and insisted on turning down a deep hollow, or
+dale, that headed near the road, to hunt some water. We had followed
+down the dale for near four hundred yards, when I drew my pistol and
+shot him through. He fell dead; I commenced hunting for his cash, and
+opened his large pocketbook, which was stuffed very full; and when I
+began to open it I thought it was a treasure indeed; but oh! the
+contents of that book! it was richly filled with the copies of
+love-songs, the forms of love-letters, and some of his own
+composition,&mdash;but no cash. I began to cut off his clothes with my knife,
+<!-- Page 66 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>and examine them for his money. I found four dollars and a half in
+change in his pockets, and no more. And is this the amount for which
+twenty negroes sold? thought I. I recollected his watch and jewelry, and
+I gathered them in; his chain was rich and good, but it was swung to an
+old brass watch. He was a puff for true, and I thought all such fools
+ought to die as soon as possible. I took his horse, and swapped him to
+an Indian native for four ponies, and sold them on the way home. I
+reached home, and spent a few weeks among the girls of my acquaintance,
+in all the enjoyments that money could afford.</p>
+
+<p>"My next trip was through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina,
+Virginia, and Maryland, and then back to South Carolina, and from there
+round by Florida and Alabama. I began to conduct the progress of my
+operations, and establish my emissaries over the country in every
+direction.</p>
+
+<p>"I have been going ever since from one place to another, directing and
+managing; but I have others now as good as myself to manage. This
+fellow, Phelps, that I was telling you of before, he is a noble chap
+among the negroes, and he wants them all free; he knows how to excite
+<!-- Page 67 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>them as well as any person; but he will not do for a robber, as he
+cannot kill a man unless he has received an injury from him first. He is
+now in jail at Vicksburg, and I fear will hang. I went to see him not
+long since, but he is so strictly watched that nothing can be done. He
+has been in the habit of stopping men on the highway, and robbing them,
+and letting them go on; but that will never do for a robber; after I rob
+a man he will never give evidence against me, and there is but one safe
+plan in the business, and that is to kill&mdash;if I could not afford to kill
+a man, I would not rob.</p>
+
+<p>"The great object that we have in contemplation is to excite a rebellion
+among the negroes throughout the slave-holding states. Our plan is to
+manage so as to have it commence everywhere at the same hour. We have
+set on the 25th of December, 1835, for the time to commence our
+operations. We design having our companies so stationed over the
+country, in the vicinity of the banks and large cities, that when the
+negroes commence their carnage and slaughter, we will have detachments
+to fire the towns and rob the banks while all is confusion and dismay.
+The rebellion taking place everywhere at the same time, every part of
+the country <!-- Page 68 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>will be engaged in its own defence; and one part of the
+country can afford no relief to another, until many places will be
+entirely overrun by the negroes, and our pockets replenished from the
+banks and the desks of rich merchants' houses. It is true that in many
+places in the slave states the negro population is not strong, and would
+be easily overpowered; but, back them with a few resolute leaders from
+our clan, they will murder thousands, and huddle the remainder into
+large bodies of stationary defence for their own preservation; and then,
+in many other places, the black population is much the strongest, and
+under a leader would overrun the country before any steps could be taken
+to suppress them.</p>
+
+<p>"We do not go to every negro we see and tell him that the negroes intend
+to rebel on the night of the 25th of December, 1835. We find the most
+vicious and wickedly disposed on large farms, and poison their minds by
+telling them how they are mistreated. When we are convinced that we have
+found a bloodthirsty devil, we swear him to secrecy and disclose to him
+the secret, and convince him that every other state and section of
+country where there are any negroes intend to rebel and slay all the
+<!-- Page 69 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>whites they can on the night of the 25th of December, 1835, and assure
+him that there are thousands of white men engaged in trying to free
+them, who will die by their sides in battle. We have a long ceremony for
+the oath, which is administered in the presence of a terrific picture
+painted for that purpose, representing the monster who is to deal with
+him should he prove unfaithful in the engagements he has entered into.
+This picture is highly calculated to make a negro true to his trust, for
+he is disposed to be superstitious at best.</p>
+
+<p>"Our black emissaries have the promise of a share in the spoils we may
+gain, and we promise to conduct them to Texas should we be defeated,
+where they will be free; but we never talk of being defeated. We always
+talk of victory and wealth to them. There is no danger in any man, if
+you can ever get him once implicated or engaged in a matter. That is the
+way we employ our strikers in all things; we have them implicated before
+we trust them from our sight.</p>
+
+<p>"This may seem too bold, but that is what I glory in. All the crimes I
+have ever committed have been of the most daring; and I have been
+successful in all my attempts as yet; and I am <!-- Page 70 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>confident that I will be
+victorious in this matter, as in the robberies which I have in
+contemplation; and I will have the pleasure and honor of seeing and
+knowing that by my management I have glutted the earth with more human
+gore, and destroyed more property, than any other robber who has ever
+lived in America, or the known world. I look on the American people as
+my common enemy. My clan is strong, brave, and experienced, and rapidly
+increasing in strength every day. I should not be surprised if we were
+to be two thousand strong by the 25th of December, 1835; and, in
+addition to this, I have the advantage of any other leader of banditti
+that has ever preceded me, for at least one-half of my Grand Council are
+men of high standing, and many of them in honorable and lucrative
+offices."</p>
+
+<p>The number of men, more or less prominent, in the different states
+included: sixty-one from Tennessee, forty-seven from Mississippi,
+forty-six from Arkansas, twenty-five from Kentucky, twenty-seven from
+Missouri, twenty-eight from Alabama, thirty-three from Georgia,
+thirty-five from South Carolina, thirty-two from North Carolina,
+twenty-one from Virginia, twenty-seven from Maryland, sixteen from
+Florida, <!-- Page 71 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>thirty-two from Louisiana. The transient members who made a
+habit of traveling from place to place numbered twenty-two; Murrell said
+that there was a total list of two thousand men in his band, including
+all classes.</p>
+
+<p>To the foregoing sketch of Murrell's life Mr. Alexander Hynds, historian
+of Tennessee, adds some facts and comments which will enable the reader
+more fully to make his own estimate as to this singular man:</p>
+
+<p>"The central meeting place of Murrell's band was near an enormous
+cottonwood tree in Mississippi county, Arkansas. It was standing in
+1890, and is perhaps still standing in the wilderness shortly above
+Memphis. His widely scattered bands had a system of signs and passwords.
+Murrell himself was married to the sister of one of his gang. He bought
+a good farm near Denmark, Madison county, Tennessee, where he lived as a
+plain farmer, while he conducted the most fearful schemes of rapine and
+murder from New Orleans up to Memphis, St. Louis and Cincinnati.</p>
+
+<p>"Nature had done much for Murrell. He had a quick mind, a fine natural
+address and great adaptability; and he was as much at ease among the
+refined and cultured as with his own <!-- Page 72 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>gang. He made a special study of
+criminal law, and knew something of medicine. He often palmed himself
+off as a preacher, and preached in large camp-meetings&mdash;and some were
+converted under his ministry! He often used his clerical garb in passing
+counterfeit money. With a clear head, cool, fine judgment, and a nature
+utterly without fear, moral or physical, his power over his men never
+waned. To them he was just, fair and amiable. He was a kind husband and
+brother, and a faithful friend. He took great pride in his position and
+in the operations of his gang. This conceit was the only weak spot in
+his nature, and led to his downfall.</p>
+
+<p>"Stewart, who purports to be Murrell's biographer, made Murrell's
+acquaintance, pretended to join his gang, and playing on his vanity,
+attended a meeting of the gang at the rendezvous at the Big Cottonwood,
+and saw the meeting of the Grand Council. He had Murrell arrested, and
+he was tried, convicted and sent to the Tennessee penitentiary in 1834
+for ten years. There he worked in the blacksmith shops, but by the time
+he got out, was broken down in mind and body, emerging an imbecile and
+an invalid, to live less than a year.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 73 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span></p><p>"Stewart's account holds inconsistencies and inaccuracies, such as that
+many men high in social and official life belonged to Murrell's gang,
+which his published lists do not show. He had perhaps 440 to 450 men,
+scattered from New Orleans to Cincinnati, but his downfall spread fear
+and distrust among them.</p>
+
+<p>"At Vicksburg, on July 4, 1835, a drunken member of the gang threatened
+to attack the authorities, and was tarred and feathered. Others of the
+gang, or at least several well-known gamblers, collected and defied the
+citizens, and killed the good and brave Dr. Bodley. Five men were hung,
+Hullams, Dutch Bill, North, Smith and McCall. The news swept like
+wildfire through the Mississippi Valley and gave heart to the lovers of
+law and order. At one or two other places some were shot, some were
+hanged, and now and then one or two were sent to prison, and thus an end
+was put to organized crime in the Southwest forever; and this closed out
+the reign of the river cutthroats, pirates and gamblers as well."</p>
+
+<p>Thus, as in the case of Sturdevant, lynch law put an effectual end to
+outlawry that the law itself could not control.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page 74 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Chapter_V" id="Chapter_V"></a>Chapter V</h2>
+
+<p>The Vigilantes of California&mdash;<i>The Greatest Vigilante Movement of the
+World</i>&mdash;<i>History of the California "Stranglers" and Their Methods</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p>The world will never see another California. Great gold stampedes there
+may be, but under conditions far different from those of 1849.
+Transportation has been so developed, travel has become so swift and
+easy, that no section can now long remain segregated from the rest of
+the world. There is no corner of the earth which may not now be reached
+with a celerity impossible in the days of the great rush to the Pacific
+Coast. The whole structure of civilization, itself based upon
+transportation, goes swiftly forward with that transportation, and the
+tent of the miner or adventurer finds immediately erected by its side
+the temple of the law.</p>
+
+<p>It was not thus in those early days of our <!-- Page 75 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>Western history. The law was
+left far behind by reason of the exigencies of geography and of
+wilderness travel. Thousands of honest men pressed on across the plains
+and mountains inflamed, it is true, by the madness of the lust for gold,
+but carrying at the outset no wish to escape from the watch-care of the
+law. With them went equal numbers of those eager to escape all
+restraints of society and law, men intending never to aid in the
+uprearing of the social system in new wild lands. Both these elements,
+the law-loving and the law-hating, as they advanced <i>pari-passu</i> farther
+and farther from the staid world which they had known, noticed the
+development of a strange phenomenon: that law, which they had left
+behind them, waned in importance with each passing day. The standards of
+the old home changed, even as customs changed. A week's journey from the
+settlements showed the argonaut a new world. A month hedged it about to
+itself, alone, apart, with ideas and values of its own and independent
+of all others. A year sufficed to leave that world as distinct as though
+it occupied a planet all its own. For that world the divine fire of the
+law must be re-discovered, evolved, nay, evoked fresh from chaos even as
+the savage <!-- Page 76 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>calls forth fire from the dry and sapless twigs of the
+wilderness.</p>
+
+<p>In the gold country all ideas and principles were based upon new
+conditions. Precedents did not exist. Man had gone savage again, and it
+was the beginning. Yet this savage, willing to live as a savage in a
+land which was one vast encampment, was the Anglo-Saxon savage, and
+therefore carried with him that chief trait of the American character,
+the principle that what a man earns&mdash;not what he steals, but what he
+earns&mdash;is his and his alone. This principle sowed in ground forbidding
+and unpromising was the seed of the law out of which has sprung the
+growth of a mighty civilization fit to be called an empire of its own.
+The growth and development of law under such conditions offered
+phenomena not recorded in the history of any other land or time.</p>
+
+<p>In the first place, and even while in transit, men organized for the
+purpose of self-protection, and in this necessary act law-abiding and
+criminal elements united. After arriving at the scenes of the gold
+fields, such organization was forgotten; even the parties that had
+banded together in the Eastern states as partners rarely kept together
+for a month after reaching the <!-- Page 77 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>region where luck, hazard and
+opportunity, inextricably blended, appealed to each man to act for
+himself and with small reference to others. The first organizations of
+the mining camps were those of the criminal element. They were presently
+met by the organization of the law and order men. Hard upon the miners'
+law came the regularly organized legal machinery of the older states,
+modified by local conditions, and irretrievably blended with a politics
+more corrupt than any known before or since. Men were busy in picking up
+raw gold from the earth, and they paid small attention to courts and
+government. The law became an unbridled instrument of evil. Judges of
+the courts openly confiscated the property of their enemies, or
+sentenced them with no reference to the principles of justice, with as
+great disregard for life and liberty as was ever known in the
+Revolutionary days of France. Against this manner of government
+presently arose the organizations of the law-abiding, the
+justice-loving, and these took the law into their own stern hands. The
+executive officers of the law, the sheriffs and constables, were in
+league to kill and confiscate; and against these the new agency of the
+actual law made war, constituting themselves <!-- Page 78 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>into an arm of essential
+government, and openly called themselves Vigilantes. In turn criminals
+used the cloak of the Vigilantes to cover their own deeds of lawlessness
+and violence. The Vigilantes purged themselves of the false members, and
+carried their own title of opprobrium, the "stranglers," with unconcern
+or pride. They grew in numbers, the love of justice their lodestone,
+until at one time they numbered more than five thousand in the city of
+San Francisco alone, and held that community in a grip of lawlessness,
+or law, as you shall choose to term it. They set at defiance the chief
+executive of the state, erected an armed castle of their own, seized
+upon the arms of the militia, defied the government of the United States
+and even the United States army! They were, as you shall choose to call
+them, criminals, or great and noble men. Seek as you may to-day, you
+will never know the full roster of their names, although they made no
+concealment of their identity; and no one, to this day, has ever been
+able to determine who took the first step in their organization. They
+began their labors in California at a time when there had been more than
+two thousand murders&mdash;five hundred in one year&mdash;and not five legal
+executions. <!-- Page 79 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>Their task included the erection of a fit structure of the
+law, and, incidentally, the destruction of a corrupt and unworthy
+structure claiming the title of the law. In this strange, swift panorama
+there is all the story of the social system, all the picture of the
+building of that temple of the law which, as Americans, we now revere,
+or, at times, still despise and desecrate.</p>
+
+<p>At first the average gold seeker concerned himself little with law,
+because he intended to make his fortune quickly and then hasten back
+East to his former home; yet, as early as the winter of 1849, there was
+elected a legislature which met at San Jos&eacute;, a Senate of sixteen members
+and an Assembly of thirty-six. In this election the new American vote
+was in evidence. The miners had already tired of the semi-military phase
+of their government, and had met and adopted a state constitution. The
+legislature enacted one hundred and forty new laws in two months, and
+abolished all former laws; and then, satisfied with its labors, it left
+the enforcement of the laws, in the good old American fashion, to
+whomsoever might take an interest in the matter.<a name="FNanchor_D_4" id="FNanchor_D_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_D_4" class="fnanchor">[D]</a> This is our custom
+even to-day. Our great cities of the East are practically <!-- Page 80 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>all governed,
+so far as they are governed at all, by civic leagues, civic federations,
+citizens' leagues, business men's associations&mdash;all protests at
+non-enforcement of the law. This protest in '49 and on the Pacific coast
+took a sterner form.</p>
+
+
+<p>At one time the city of San Francisco had three separate and distinct
+city councils, each claiming to be the only legal one. In spite of the
+new state organization, the law was much a matter of go as you please.
+Under such conditions it was no wonder that outlawry began to show its
+head in bold and well-organized forms. A party of ruffians, who called
+themselves the "Hounds," banded together to run all foreigners out of
+the rich camps, and to take their diggings over for themselves. A number
+of Chileans were beaten or shot, and their property was confiscated or
+destroyed. This was not in accordance with the saving grace of American
+justice, which devoted to a man that which he had earned. A counter
+organization was promptly formed, and the "Hounds" found themselves
+confronted with two hundred "special constables," each with a good
+rifle. A mass meeting sat as a court, and twenty of the "Hounds" were
+tried, ten of them receiving <!-- Page 81 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span>sentences that never were enforced, but
+which had the desired effect. So now, while far to the eastward the
+Congress was hotly arguing the question of the admission of California
+as a state, she was beginning to show an interest in law and justice
+when aroused thereto.</p>
+
+<p>It was difficult material out of which to build a civilized community.
+The hardest population of the entire world was there; men savage or
+civilized by tradition, heathen or Christian once at least, but now all
+Californian. Wealth was the one common thing. The average daily return
+in the work of mining ranged from twenty to thirty dollars, and no man
+might tell when his fortune might be made by a blow of a pick. Some
+nuggets of gold weighing twenty-five pounds were discovered. In certain
+diggings men picked pure gold from the rock crevices with a spoon or a
+knife point. As to values, they were guessed at, the only currency being
+gold dust or nuggets. Prodigality was universal. All the gamblers of the
+world met in vulture concourse. There was little in the way of home; of
+women almost none. Life was as cheap as gold dust. Let those who liked
+bother about statehood and government and politics; the average man was
+too busy digging <!-- Page 82 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>and spending gold to trouble over such matters. The
+most shameless men were those found in public office. Wealth and
+commerce waxed great, but law and civilization languished. The times
+were ripening for the growth of some system of law which would offer
+proper protection to life and property. The measure of this need may be
+seen from the figures of the production of gold. From 1848 to 1856
+California produced between five hundred and six hundred million dollars
+in virgin gold. What wonder the courts were weak; and what wonder the
+Vigilantes became strong!</p>
+
+<p>There were in California three distinct Vigilante movements, those of
+1849, 1851, and 1856, the earliest applying rather to the outlying
+mining camps than to the city of San Francisco. In 1851, seeing that the
+courts made no attempt to punish criminals, a committee was formed which
+did much toward enforcing respect for the principles of justice, if not
+of law. On June 11 they hanged John Jenkins for robbing a store. A month
+later they hanged James Stuart for murdering a sheriff. In August of the
+same summer they took out of jail and hanged Whittaker and McKenzie,
+Australian ex-convicts, whom they <!-- Page 83 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>had tried and sentenced, but who had
+been rescued by the officers of the law. Two weeks later this committee
+disbanded. They paid no attention to the many killings that were going
+on over land titles and the like, but confined themselves to punishing
+men who had committed intolerable crimes. Theft was as serious as
+murder, perhaps more so, in the creed of the time and place. The list of
+murders reached appalling dimensions. The times were sadly out of joint.
+The legislature was corrupt, graft was rampant&mdash;though then unknown by
+that name&mdash;and the entire social body was restless, discontented, and
+uneasy. Politics had become a fine art. The judiciary, lazy and corrupt,
+was held in contempt. The dockets of the courts were full, and little
+was done to clear them effectively. Criminals did as they liked and went
+unwhipped of justice. It was truly a day of violence and license.</p>
+
+<p>Once more the sober and law-loving men of California sent abroad word,
+and again the Vigilantes assembled. In 1853 they hanged two Mexicans for
+horse stealing, and also a bartender who had shot a citizen near Shasta.
+At Jackson they hanged another Mexican for horse stealing, and at
+Volcano, in 1854, they <!-- Page 84 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>hanged a man named Macy for stabbing an old and
+helpless man. In this instance vengeance was very swift, for the
+murderer was executed within half an hour after his deed. The haste
+caused certain criticism when, in the same month one Johnson was hanged
+for stabbing a man named Montgomery, at Iowa Hill, who later recovered.
+At Los Angeles three men were sentenced to death by the local court, but
+the Supreme Court issued a stay for two of them, Brown and Lee. The
+people asserted that all must die together, and the mayor of the city
+was of the same mind. The third man, Alvitre, was hanged legally on
+January 12, 1855. On that day the mayor resigned his office to join the
+Vigilantes. Brown was taken out of jail and hanged in spite of the
+decision of the Supreme Court. The people were out-running the law. That
+same month they hanged another murderer for killing the treasurer of
+Tuolumne county. In the following month they hanged three more cattle
+thieves in Contra Costa county, and followed this by hanging a horse
+thief in Oakland. A larger affair threatened in the following summer,
+when thirty-six Mexicans were arrested for killing a party of Americans.
+For a time it <!-- Page 85 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>was proposed to hang all thirty-six, but sober counsel
+prevailed and only three were hanged; this after formal jury trial.
+Unknown bandits waylaid and killed Isaac B. Wall and T. S. Williamson of
+Monterey, and, that same month U. S. Marshal William H. Richardson was
+shot by Charles Cora in the streets of San Francisco. The people
+grumbled. There was no certainty that justice would ever reach these
+offenders. The reputation of the state was ruined, not by the acts of
+the Vigilantes, but by those of unscrupulous and unprincipled men in
+office and upon the bench. The government was run by gamblers, ruffians,
+and thugs. The good men of the state began to prepare for a general
+movement of purification and the installation of an actual law. The
+great Vigilante movement of 1856 was the result.</p>
+
+<p>The immediate cause of this last organization was the murder of James
+King, editor of the <i>Bulletin</i>, by James P. Casey. Casey, after shooting
+King, was hurried off to jail by his own friends, and there was
+protected by a display of military force. King lingered for six days
+after he was shot, and the state of public opinion was ominous. Cora,
+who had <!-- Page 86 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>killed Marshal Richardson, had never been punished, and there
+seemed no likelihood that Casey would be. The local press was divided.
+The religious papers, the <i>Pacific</i> and the <i>Christian Advocate</i>, both
+openly declared that Casey ought to be hanged. The clergy took up the
+matter sternly, and one minister of the Gospel, Rev. J. A. Benton, of
+Sacramento, gave utterance to this remarkable but well-grounded
+statement: "<i>A people can be justified in recalling delegated power and
+resuming its exercise.</i>" Before we hasten to criticize sweepingly under
+the term "mob law" such work as this of the Vigilantes, it will be well
+for us to weigh that utterance, and to apply it to conditions of our own
+times; to-day is well-nigh as dangerous to American liberties as were
+the wilder days of California.</p>
+
+<p>Now, summoned by some unknown command, armed men appeared in the streets
+of San Francisco, twenty-four companies in all, with perhaps fifty men
+in each company. The Vigilantes had organized again. They brought a
+cannon and placed it against the jail gate, and demanded that Casey be
+surrendered to them. There was no help for it, and Casey went away
+handcuffed, to face a court where <!-- Page 87 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>political influence would mean
+nothing. An hour later the murderer Cora was taken from his cell, and
+was hastened away to join Casey in the headquarters building of the
+Vigilantes. A company of armed and silent men marched on each side of
+the carriage containing the prisoner. The two men were tried in formal
+session of the Committee, each having counsel, and all evidence being
+carefully weighed.</p>
+
+<p>King died on May 20, 1856, and on May 22d was buried with popular
+honors, a long procession of citizens following the body to the
+cemetery. A popular subscription was started, and in a brief time over
+thirty thousand dollars was raised for the benefit of his widow and
+children. When the long procession filed back into the city, it was to
+witness, swinging from a beam projecting from a window of Committee
+headquarters, the bodies of Casey and Cora.</p>
+
+<p>The Committee now arrested two more men, not for a capital crime, but
+for one which lay back of a long series of capital crimes&mdash;the stuffing
+of ballot-boxes and other election frauds. These men were Billy Mulligan
+and the prize-fighter known as Yankee Sullivan. Although advised that he
+would have a fair <!-- Page 88 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>trial and that the death penalty would not be passed
+upon him, Yankee Sullivan committed suicide in his cell. The entire
+party of lawyers and judges were arrayed against the Committee,
+naturally enough. Judge Terry, of the Supreme Court, issued a writ of
+<i>habeas corpus</i> for Mulligan. The Committee ignored the sheriff who was
+sent to serve the writ. They cleared the streets in front of
+headquarters, established six cannon in front of their rooms, put loaded
+swivels on top of the roof and mounted a guard of a hundred riflemen.
+They brought bedding and provisions to their quarters, mounted a huge
+triangle on the roof for a signal to their men all over the city,
+arranged the interior of their rooms in the form of a court and, in
+short, set themselves up as the law, openly defying their own Supreme
+Court of the state. So far from being afraid of the vengeance of the
+law, they arrested two more men for election frauds, Chas. P. Duane and
+"Woolly" Kearney. All their prisoners were guarded in cells within the
+headquarters building.</p>
+
+<p>The opposition to the Committee now organized in turn under the name of
+the "Law and Order Men," and held a public meeting. <!-- Page 89 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>This was numerously
+attended by members of the Vigilante Committee, whose books were now
+open for enrollment. Not even the criticism of their own friends stayed
+these men in their resolution. They went even further. Governor Johnson
+issued a proclamation to them to disband and disperse. They paid no more
+attention to this than they had to Judge Terry's writ of <i>habeas
+corpus</i>. The governor threatened them with the militia, but it was not
+enough to frighten them. General Sherman resigned his command in the
+state militia, and counseled moderation at so dangerous a time. Many of
+the militia turned in their rifles to the Committee, which got other
+arms from vessels in the harbor, and from carelessly guarded armories.
+Halting at no responsibility, a band of the Committee even boarded a
+schooner which was carrying down a cargo of rifles from the governor to
+General Howard at San Francisco, and seized the entire lot. Shortly
+after this they confiscated a second shipment which the governor was
+sending down from Sacramento in the same way; thus seizing property of
+the federal government. If there was such a crime as high treason, they
+committed it, and did so openly and without hesitation. Governor
+<!-- Page 90 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>Johnson contented himself with drawing up a statement of the situation,
+which was sent down to President Pierce at Washington, with the request
+that he instruct naval officers on the Pacific station to supply arms to
+the State of California, which had been despoiled by certain of its
+citizens. President Pierce turned over the matter to his
+attorney-general, Caleb Cushing, who rendered an opinion saying that
+Governor Johnson had not yet exhausted the state remedies, and that the
+United States government could not interfere.</p>
+
+<p>Little remained for the Committee to do to show its resolution to act as
+the State <i>pro tempore</i>. That little it now proceeded to do by
+practically suspending the Supreme Court of California. In making an
+arrest of a witness wanted by the Committee, Sterling A. Hopkins, one of
+the policemen retained for work by the Committee, was stabbed in the
+throat by Judge Terry, of the Supreme Bench, who was very bitter against
+all members of the Committee. It was supposed that the wound would prove
+fatal, and at once the Committee sounded the call for general assembly.
+The city went into two hostile camps, Terry and his friend, Dr. Ashe,
+taking refuge in the armory <!-- Page 91 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>where the "Law and Order" faction kept
+their arms. The members of the Vigilante Committee besieged this place,
+and presently took charge of Terry and Ashe, as prisoners. Then the
+scouts of the Committee went out after the arms of all the armories
+belonging to the governor and the "Law and Order" men who supported him,
+the lawyers and politicians who felt that their functions were being
+usurped. Two thousand rifles were taken, and the opposing party was left
+without arms. The entire state, so to speak, was now in the hands of the
+"Committee of Vigilance," a body of men, quiet, law-loving,
+law-enforcing, but of course technically traitors and criminals. The
+parallel of this situation has never existed elsewhere in American
+history.</p>
+
+<p>Had Hopkins died the probability is that Judge Terry would have been
+hanged by the Committee, but fortunately he did not die. Terry lay a
+prisoner in the cell assigned him at the Committee's rooms for seven
+weeks, by which time Hopkins had recovered from the wound given him by
+Terry. The case became one of national interest, and tirades against
+"the Stranglers" were not lacking; but the Committee went on enrolling
+men. And it did <!-- Page 92 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>not open its doors for its prisoners, although appeal
+was made to Congress in Terry's behalf&mdash;an appeal which was referred to
+the Committee on Judiciary, and so buried.</p>
+
+<p>Terry was finally released, much to the regret of many of the Committee,
+who thought he should have been punished. The executive committee called
+together the board of delegates, and issued a statement showing that
+death and banishment were the only penalties optional with them. Death
+they could not inflict, because Hopkins had recovered; and banishment
+they thought impractical at that time, as it might prolong discussion
+indefinitely, and enforce a longer term in service than the Committee
+cared for. It was the earnest wish of all to disband at the first moment
+that they considered their state and city fit to take care of
+themselves, and the sacredness of the ballot-box again insured. To
+assure this latter fact, they had arrayed themselves against the federal
+government, as certainly they had against the state government.</p>
+
+<p>The Committee now hanged two more murderers&mdash;Hetherington and Brace&mdash;the
+former a gambler from St. Louis, the latter a youth of New York
+parentage, twenty-one years of <!-- Page 93 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>age, but hardened enough to curse
+volubly upon the scaffold. By the middle of August, 1856, they had no
+more prisoners in charge, and were ready to turn the city over to its
+own system of government. Their report, published in the following fall,
+showed they had hanged four men and banished many others, besides
+frightening out of the country a large criminal population that did not
+tarry for arrest and trial.</p>
+
+<p>If opinion was divided to some extent in San Francisco, where those
+stirring deeds occurred, the sentiment of the outlying communities of
+California was almost a unit in favor of the Vigilantes, and their
+action received the sincere flattery of imitation, as half a score of
+criminals learned to their sorrow on impromptu scaffolds. There was no
+large general organization in any other community, however. After a time
+some of the banished men came back, and many damage suits were argued
+later in the courts; but small satisfaction came to those claimants, and
+few men who knew of the deeds of the "Committee of Vigilance" ever cared
+to discuss them. Indeed it was practically certain that any man who ever
+served on a Western vigilance committee finished his life with sealed
+<!-- Page 94 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>lips. Had he ventured to talk of what he knew he would have met
+contempt or something harsher.</p>
+
+<p>A political capital was made out of the situation in San Francisco. The
+"Committee of Vigilance" felt that it had now concluded its work and was
+ready to go back to civil life. On August 18, 1856, the Committee
+marched openly in review through the streets of the city, five thousand
+one hundred and thirty-seven men in line, with three companies of
+artillery, eighteen cannon, a company of dragoons, and a medical staff
+of forty odd physicians. There were in this body one hundred and fifty
+men who had served in the old Committee in 1851. After the parade the
+men halted, the assemblage broke up into companies, the companies into
+groups; and thus, quietly, with no vaunting of themselves and no
+concealment of their acts, there passed away one of the most singular
+and significant organizations of American citizens ever known. They did
+this with the quiet assertion that if their services were again needed,
+they would again assemble; and they printed a statement covering their
+actions in detail, showing to any fair-minded man that what they had
+done was indeed for the good <!-- Page 95 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>of the whole community, which had been
+wronged by those whom it had elected to power, those who had set
+themselves up as masters where they had been chosen as servants.</p>
+
+<p>The "Committee of Vigilance" of San Francisco was made up of men from
+all walks of life and all political parties. It had any amount of money
+at its command that it required, for its members were of the best and
+most influential citizens. It maintained, during its existence, quarters
+unique in their way, serving as arms-room, trial court, fortress, and
+prison. It was not a mob, but a grave and orderly band of men, and its
+deliberations were formal and exact, its labors being divided among
+proper sub-committees and boards. The quarters were kept open day and
+night, always ready for swift action, if necessary. It had an executive
+committee, which upon occasion conferred with a board of delegates
+composed of three men from each subdivision of the general body. The
+executive committee consisted of thirty-three members, and its decision
+was final; but it could not enforce a death penalty except on a
+two-thirds vote of those present. It had a prosecuting attorney, and it
+tried no prisoner without assigning to him competent counsel. <!-- Page 96 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>It had
+also a police force, with a chief of police and a sheriff with several
+deputies. In short, it took over the government, and was indeed the
+government, municipal and state in one. Recent as was its life, its
+deeds to-day are well-nigh forgotten. Though opinion may be still
+divided in certain quarters, California need not be ashamed of this
+"Committee of Vigilance." She should be proud of it, for it was largely
+through its unthanked and dangerous safeguarding of the public interests
+that California gained her social system of to-day.</p>
+
+<p>In all the history of American desperadoism and of the movements which
+have checked it, there is no page more worth study than this from the
+story of the great Golden State. The moral is a sane, clean, and strong
+one. The creed of the "Committee of Vigilance" is one which we might
+well learn to-day; and its practice would leave us with more dignity of
+character than we can claim, so long as we content ourselves merely with
+outcry and criticism, with sweeping accusation of our unfaithful public
+servants, and without seeing that they are punished. There is nothing
+but manhood and freedom and justice in the covenant of the Committee.
+That covenant all American citizens <!-- Page 97 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>should be ready to sign and live up
+to: "We do bind ourselves each unto the other by a solemn oath to do and
+perform every just and lawful act for the maintenance of law and order,
+<i>and to sustain the laws when faithfully and properly administered</i>. But
+we are determined that no thief, burglar, incendiary, assassin,
+<i>ballot-box stuffer or other disturber of the peace</i>, shall escape
+punishment, either by quibbles of the law, the carelessness of the
+police or a laxity of those who pretend to administer justice."</p>
+
+<p>What a man earns, that is his&mdash;such was the lesson of California.
+Self-government is our right as a people&mdash;that is what the Vigilantes
+said. When the laws failed of execution, then it was the people's right
+to resume the power that they had delegated, or which had been usurped
+from them&mdash;that is their statement as quoted by one of the ablest of
+many historians of this movement. The people might withdraw authority
+when faithless servants used it to thwart justice&mdash;that was what the
+Vigilantes preached. It is good doctrine to-day.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page 98 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Chapter_VI" id="Chapter_VI"></a>Chapter VI</h2>
+
+<p>The Outlaw of the Mountains&mdash;<i>The Gold Stampedes of the '60's</i>&mdash;<i>Armed
+Bandits of the Mountain Mining Camps</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p>The greatest of American gold stampedes, and perhaps the greatest of the
+world, not even excepting that of Australia, was that following upon the
+discovery of gold in California. For twenty years all the West was mad
+for gold. No other way would serve but the digging of wealth directly
+from the soil. Agriculture was too slow, commerce too tame, to satisfy
+the bold population of the frontier. The history of the first struggle
+for mining claims in California&mdash;one stampede after another, as this,
+that and the other "strike" was reported in new localities&mdash;was repeated
+all over the vast region of the auriferous mountain lands lying between
+the plains and California, which were swiftly prospected <!-- Page 99 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>by men who had
+now learned well the prospector's trade. The gold-hunters lapped back on
+their own trails, and, no longer content with California, began to
+prospect lower Oregon, upper Idaho, and Western Montana. Walla Walla was
+a supply point for a time. Florence was a great mountain market, and
+Lewiston. One district after another sprang into prominence, to fade
+away after a year or two of feverish life. The placers near Bannack
+caught a wild set of men, who surged back from California. Oro Fino was
+a temporary capital; then the fabulously rich placer which made Alder
+Gulch one of the quickly perished but still unforgotten diggings.</p>
+
+<p>The flat valley of this latter gulch housed several "towns," but was
+really for a dozen miles a continuous string of miners' cabins. The city
+of Helena is built on the tailings of these placer washings, and its
+streets are literally paved with gold even to-day. Here in 1863, while
+the great conflict between North and South was raging, a great community
+of wild men, not organized into anything fit to be called society,
+divided and fought bitterly for control of the apparently exhaustless
+wealth which came pouring from the virgin mines. <!-- Page 100 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>These clashing
+factions repeated, in intensified form, the history of California. They
+were even more utterly cut off from all the world. Letters and papers
+from the states had to reach the mountains by way of California, via the
+Horn or the Isthmus. Touch with the older civilization was utterly lost;
+of law there was none.</p>
+
+<p>Upon the social horizon now appeared the sinister figure of the trained
+desperado, the professional bad man. The business of outlawry was turned
+into a profession, one highly organized, relatively safe and extremely
+lucrative. There was wealth to be had for the asking or the taking. Each
+miner had his buckskin purse filled with native gold. This dust was like
+all other dust. It could not be traced nor identified; and the old
+saying, "'Twas mine, 'tis his," might here of all places in the world
+most easily become true. Checks, drafts, currency as we know it now, all
+the means by which civilized men keep record of their property
+transactions, were unknown. The gold-scales established the only
+currency, and each man was his own banker, obliged to be his own peace
+officer, and the defender of his own property.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 101 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span></p><p>Now our desperado appeared, the man who had killed his man, or, more
+likely, several men, and who had not been held sternly to an accounting
+for his acts; the man with the six-shooter and the skill to use it more
+swiftly and accurately than the average man; the man with the mind which
+did not scruple at murder. He found much to encourage him, little to
+oppose him. "The crowd from both East and West had now arrived. The town
+was full of gold-hunters. Expectation lighted up the countenance of
+every new-comer. Few had yet realized the utter despair of failure in a
+mining camp. In the presence of vice in all its forms, men who were
+staid and exemplary at home laid aside their morality like a useless
+garment, and yielded to the seductive influences spread for their ruin.
+The gambling-shops and hurdy-gurdy saloons&mdash;beheld for the first time by
+many of these fortune-seekers&mdash;lured them on step by step, until many of
+them abandoned all thought of the object they had in pursuit for lives
+of shameful and criminal indulgence. The condition of society thus
+produced was fatal to all attempts at organization, either for
+protection or good order."</p>
+
+<p>Yet the same condition made opportunity <!-- Page 102 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>for those who did not wish to
+see a society established. Wherever the law-abiding did not organize,
+the bandits did; and the strength of their party, the breadth and
+boldness of its operations, and the length of time it carried on its
+unmolested operations, form one of the most extraordinary incidents in
+American history. They killed, robbed, and terrorized over hundreds of
+miles of mountain country, for years setting at defiance all attempts at
+their restraint. They recognized no command except that of their
+"chief," whose title was always open to contest, and who gained his own
+position only by being more skilful, more bloodthirsty, and more
+unscrupulous than his fellows.</p>
+
+<p>Henry Plummer, the most important captain of these cutthroats of the
+mountains, had a hundred or more men in his widely scattered criminal
+confederacy. More than one hundred murders were committed by these
+banditti in the space of three years. Many others were, without doubt,
+committed and never traced. Dead bodies were common in those hills, and
+often were unidentified. The wanderer from the States usually kept his
+own counsel. None knew who his family might be; and that family,
+<!-- Page 103 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>missing a member who disappeared into the maw of the great West of that
+day of danger, might never know the fate of the one mysteriously
+vanished.</p>
+
+<p>These robbers had their confederates scattered in all ranks of life.
+Plummer himself was sheriff of his county, and had confederates in
+deputies or city marshals. This was a strange feature of this old
+desperadoism in the West&mdash;it paraded often in the guise of the law. We
+shall find further instances of this same phenomenon. Employ&eacute;s, friends,
+officials&mdash;there was none that one might trust. The organization of the
+robbers even extended to the stage lines, and a regular system of
+communication existed by which the allies advised each other when and
+where such and such a passenger was going, with such and such an amount
+of gold upon him. The holding up of the stage was something regularly
+expected, and the traveler who had any money or valuables drew a long
+breath when he reached a region where there was really a protecting law.
+Men were shot down in the streets on little or no provocation, and the
+murderer boasted of his crime and defied punishment. The dance-halls
+were run day and night. The drinking <!-- Page 104 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>of whiskey, and, moreover, bad
+whiskey, was a thing universal. Vice was everywhere and virtue was not.
+Those few who had an aim and an ambition in life were long in the
+minority and, in the welter of a general license, they might not
+recognize each other and join hands. Murder and pillage ruled, until at
+length the spirit of law and order, born anew of necessity, grew and
+gained power as it did in most early communities of the West. How these
+things in time took place may best be seen by reference to the bloody
+biographies of some of the most reckless desperadoes ever seen in any
+land.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page 105 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Chapter_VII" id="Chapter_VII"></a>Chapter VII</h2>
+
+<p>Henry Plummer&mdash;<i>A Northern Bad Man</i>&mdash;<i>The Head of the Robber Band in the
+Montana Mining Country</i>&mdash;<i>A Man of Brains and Ability, but a
+Cold-Blooded Murderer</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p>Henry Plummer was for several years in the early '60's the "chief" of
+the widely extended band of robbers and murderers who kept the
+placer-mining fields of Montana and Idaho in a state of terror. Posing
+part of the time as an officer of the law, he was all the time the
+leader in the reign of lawlessness. He was always ready for combat, and
+he so relied upon his own skill that he would even give his antagonist
+the advantage&mdash;or just enough advantage to leave himself sure to kill
+him. His victims in duels of this sort were many, and, as to his victims
+in cold-blooded robbery, in which death wiped out the record, no one
+will ever know the list.</p>
+
+<p>Plummer was born in Connecticut in 1837, <!-- Page 106 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>and, until his departure as a
+young man for the West, he was all that might be expected of one brought
+up under the chastening influences of a New England home. He received a
+good education, and became a polished, affable, and gentlemanly
+appearing man. He was about five feet ten, possibly five feet eleven
+inches in height, and weighed about one hundred and sixty pounds, being
+rather slender in appearance. His face was handsome and his demeanor
+always frank and open, although he was quiet and did not often talk
+unless accosted. His voice was low and pleasant, and he had no bravado
+or swagger about him. His eye was light in color and singularly devoid
+of expression. Two features gave him a sinister look&mdash;his forehead,
+which was low and brutish, and his eye, which was cold and fish-like.
+His was a strong, well-keyed nervous organization. He was quick as a cat
+when in action, though apparently suave and easy in disposition. He was
+a good pistol shot, perhaps the best of all the desperadoes who infested
+Idaho and Montana at that time. Not even in his cups did he lose control
+of voice and eye and weapon. He was always ready&mdash;a cool, quiet,
+self-possessed, well-regulated killing machine.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 107 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span></p><p>At the date of Plummer's arrival in the mining country, the town of
+Lewiston, Idaho, was the emporium of a wide region then embraced under
+the name of Idaho Territory; the latter also including Montana at that
+time. Where his life had been spent previous to that is not known, but
+it is thought that he came over from California. Plummer set up as a
+gambler, and this gave him the key to the brotherhood of the bad.
+Gamblers usually stick together pretty closely, and institute a sort of
+free-masonry of their own; so that Plummer was not long in finding,
+among men of his own profession and their associates, a number of others
+whom he considered safe to take into his confidence. Every man accepted
+by Plummer was a murderer. He would have no weaklings. No one can tell
+how many victims his associates had had before they went into his
+alliance; but it is sure that novices in man-killing were not desired,
+nor any who had not been proved of nerve. Plummer soon had so many men
+that he set up a rendezvous at points on all the trails leading out from
+Lewiston to such mines as were producing any gold. One robbery followed
+another, until the band threw off all restraint and ran the towns as
+they liked, paying <!-- Page 108 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>for what they took when they felt like it, and
+laughing at the protests of the minority of the population, which was
+placed in the hard strait of being in that country and unable to get out
+without being robbed. It was the intention to seize the property of
+every man who was there and who was not accepted as a member of the
+gang.</p>
+
+<p>One killing after another occurred on the trails, and man after man was
+lost and never traced. Assaults were made upon many men who escaped, but
+no criminal could be located, and, indeed, there was no law by which any
+of them could be brought to book. The express riders were fired upon and
+robbed and the pack trains looted. No man expected to cross the mountain
+trails without meeting some of the robbers, and, when he did meet them,
+he expected to be killed if he made resistance, for they outnumbered the
+parties they attacked in nearly all instances. The outlaws were now
+indeed about three times as numerous as those not in sympathy with them.</p>
+
+<p>Rendered desperate by this state of affairs, a few resolute citizens who
+wanted law and order found each other out at last and organized into a
+vigilance committee, remembering <!-- Page 109 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>the success of the Vigilantes of
+California, whose work was still recent history. Plummer himself was
+among the first to join this embryonic vigilante movement, as was the
+case in so many other similar movements in other parts of the West,
+where the criminal joined the law-loving in order to find out what the
+latter intended to do. His address was such as to disarm completely all
+suspicion, and he had full knowledge of facts which enabled him to
+murder for vengeance as well as for gain.</p>
+
+<p>After Oro Fino was worked out as a placer field, the prospectors located
+other grounds east of the Salmon River range, at Elk City and Florence,
+and soon Lewiston was forsaken, all the population trooping off over the
+mountains to the new fields. This broke up the vigilante movement in its
+infancy, and gave Plummer a longer lease of life for his plans. All
+those who had joined the vigilante movement were marked men. One after
+another they were murdered, none knew by whom, or why. Masked robbers
+were seen every day along the trails leading between one remote mining
+camp and another, but no one suspected Henry Plummer, who was serving
+well in his double r&ocirc;le.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 110 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span></p><p>Meantime, additional placer grounds had been discovered a hundred and
+fifty miles south of Florence, on the Boise river, and some valuable
+strikes were also made far to the north, at the upper waters of the
+Beaverhead. All the towns to the westward were now abandoned, and the
+miners left Florence as madly as they had rushed to it from Oro Fino and
+Elk City. West Bannack and East Bannack were now all the cry. To these
+new points, as may be supposed, the organized band of robbers fled with
+the others. Plummer, who had tried Elk City, Deer Lodge, and other
+points, now appeared at Bannack.</p>
+
+<p>One after another reports continued to come of placers discovered here
+and there in the upper Rockies. Among all these, the strikes on Gold
+Creek proved to be the most extensive and valuable. A few Eastern men,
+almost by accident, had found fair "pay" there, and returned to that
+locality when they found themselves unable to get across the
+snow-covered mountains to Florence. These few men at the Gold Creek
+diggings got large additions from expeditions made up in Denver and
+bound for Florence, who also were unable to get across the Salmon River
+mountains. Yet others came <!-- Page 111 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>out in the summer of 1862, by way of the
+upper plains and the Missouri river, so that the accident of the season,
+so to speak, turned aside the traffic intended to reach Florence into
+quite another region. This fact, as events proved, had much to do with
+the later fate of Henry Plummer and his associates.</p>
+
+<p>These Eastern men were different from those who had been schooled in the
+mines of the Pacific Slope. They still clung to law and order; and they
+did not propose to be robbed. The first news of the strikes brought over
+the advance guard of the roughs who had been running the other camps;
+and, as soon as these were unmasked by acts of their own, the little
+advance guard of civilization shot one of them, Arnett, and hung two
+others, Jernigan and Spillman. This was the real beginning of a
+permanent vigilante force in Montana. It afforded perhaps the only known
+instance of a man being buried with a six-shooter in one hand and a hand
+of cards in the other. Arnett was killed in a game of cards, and died
+with his death grip thus fixed.</p>
+
+<p>The new diggings did not at first prove themselves, and the camp at
+Bannack, on Grasshopper Creek, was more prosperous. Henry <!-- Page 112 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>Plummer,
+therefore, elected Bannack as his headquarters. Others of the loosely
+connected banditti began to drop into Bannack from other districts, and
+Plummer was soon surrounded by his clan and kin in crime. George Ives,
+Bill Mitchell, Charlie Reeves, Cy Skinner, and others began operations
+on the same lines which had so distinguished them at the earlier
+diggings, west of the range. In a few weeks Bannack was as bad as
+Lewiston or Florence had ever been. In fact, it became so bad that the
+Vigilantes began to show their teeth, although they confined their
+sentences to banishment. The black sheep and the white began now to be
+segregated.</p>
+
+<p>Plummer, shrewd to see the drift of opinion, saw that he must now play
+his hand out to the finish, that he could not now reform. He accordingly
+laid his plans to kill Jack Crawford, who was chosen as miners' sheriff.
+Plummer undertook one expedient after another to draw Crawford into a
+quarrel, in which he knew he could kill him; for Plummer's speed with
+the pistol had been proved when he killed Jack Cleveland, one of his own
+best gun-fighters. Rumor ran that he was the best pistol shot in the
+Rockies and as bad a man as the worst. <!-- Page 113 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>Plummer thought that Crawford
+suspected him of belonging to the bandits, and so doomed him. Crawford
+was wary, and defeated three separate attempts to waylay and kill him,
+besides avoiding several quarrels that were thrust upon him by Plummer
+or his men. Dick Phleger, a friend of Crawford, was also marked by
+Plummer, who challenged him to fight with pistols, as he frequently had
+challenged Crawford. Phleger was a braver man than Crawford, but he
+declined the duel. Plummer would have killed them both. He only wanted
+the appearance of an "even break," with the later plea of
+"self-defence," which has shielded so many bad men from punishment for
+murder.</p>
+
+<p>Plummer now tried treachery, and told Crawford they would be friends.
+All the time he was hunting a chance to kill him. At length he held
+Crawford up in a restaurant, and stood waiting for him with a rifle. A
+friend handed Crawford a rifle, and the latter slipped up and took a
+shot from the corner of the house at Plummer, who was across the street.
+The ball struck Plummer's right arm and tore it to pieces. Crawford
+missed him with a second shot, and Plummer walked back to his own
+<!-- Page 114 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>cabin. Here he had a long siege with his wound, refusing to allow his
+arm to be amputated, since he knew he might as well be dead as so
+crippled. He finally recovered, although the ball was never removed and
+the bone never knit. The ball lodged in his wrist and was found there
+after his death, worn smooth as silver by the action of the bones.
+Crawford escaped down the Missouri river, to which he fled at Fort
+Benton. He never came back to the country. Plummer went on practising
+with the six-shooter with his left hand, and became a very good
+left-hand shot. He knew that his only safety lay in his skill with
+weapons.</p>
+
+<p>Plummer's physician was Dr. Glick, who operated under cover of a
+shotgun, and with the cheerful assurance that if he killed Plummer by
+accident, he himself would be killed. After that Glick dressed the
+wounds of more than one outlaw, but dared not tell of it. Plummer
+admitted to him at last that these were his men and told Glick he would
+kill him if he ever breathed a word of this confidence. So the knowledge
+of the existence of the banditti was known to one man for a long time.</p>
+
+<p>As to Bannack, it was one of the wildest camps ever known in any land.
+Pistol fire was <!-- Page 115 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>heard incessantly, and one victim after another was
+added to the list. George Ives, Johnny Cooper, George Carrhart, Hayes
+Lyons, Cy Skinner, and others of the toughs were now open associates of
+the leading spirit, Plummer. The condition of lawlessness and terror was
+such that all the decent men would have gone back to the States, but the
+same difficulties that had kept them from getting across to Florence now
+kept them from getting back East. The winter held them prisoners.</p>
+
+<p>Henry Plummer was now elected sheriff for the Bannack mining district,
+to succeed Crawford, whom he had run out of the country. It seems very
+difficult to understand how this could have occurred; but it will serve
+to show the numerical strength of Plummer's party. The latter, now
+married, professed to have reformed. In reality, he was deeper in
+deviltry than ever in his life.</p>
+
+<p>The diggings at Gold Creek and Bannack were now eclipsed by the
+sensational discoveries on the famous Alder Gulch, one of the phenomenal
+placers of the world, and the most productive ever known in America. The
+stampede was fast and furious to these new diggings. In ten days the
+gulch was staked out <!-- Page 116 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>for twelve miles, and the cabins of the miners
+were occupied for all of that distance, and scattered over a long, low
+flat, whose vegetation was quickly swept away. The new camp that sprung
+up on one end of this bar was called Virginia City. It need not be said
+that among the first settlers there were the outlaws earlier mentioned,
+with several others: Jack Gallagher, Buck Stinson, Ned Ray, and others,
+these three named being "deputies" of "Sheriff" Plummer. A sort of court
+was formed for trying disputed mining claims. Charley Forbes was clerk
+of this court, and incidentally one of Plummer's band! This clerk and
+these deputies killed one Dillingham, whom they suspected of informing a
+friend of a robbery planned to make away with him on the trail from
+Bannack to Virginia City. They were "tried" by the court and freed.
+Hayes Lyons admitted privately that Plummer had told him to kill the
+informer Dillingham. The invariable plan of this bloodthirsty man was to
+destroy unfavorable testimony by means of death.</p>
+
+<p>The unceasing flood of gold from the seemingly exhaustless gulch caused
+three or four more little camps or towns to spring up; but Virginia City
+now took the palm for frontier <!-- Page 117 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>reputation in hardness. Ten millions in
+"dust" was washed out in one year. Every one had gold, sacks and cans of
+it. The wild license of the place was unspeakably vitiating. Fights with
+weapons were incessant. Rude dance halls and saloons were crowded with
+truculent, armed men in search of trouble. Churches and schools were
+unknown. Tents, log cabins, and brush shanties made the residences.
+"Hacks rattled to and fro between the several towns, freighted with
+drunken and rowdy humanity of both sexes. Citizens of acknowledged
+respectability often walked, more often perhaps rode side by side on
+horseback, with noted courtesans, in open day, through the crowded
+streets, and seemingly suffered no harm in reputation. Pistols flashed,
+bowie-knives flourished, oaths filled the air. This was indeed the reign
+of unbridled license, and men who at first regarded it with disgust and
+terror, by constant exposure soon learned to become part of it, and to
+forget that they had ever been aught else. Judges, lawyers, doctors,
+even clergymen, could not claim exemption."</p>
+
+<p>This was in 1863. At that time, the nearest capitals were Olympia, on
+Puget Sound; Yankton, two thousand miles away; and Lewiston, <!-- Page 118 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>seven
+hundred miles away. What machinery of the law was there to hinder
+Plummer and his men? What better field than this one, literally
+overflowing with gold, could they have asked for their operations? And
+what better chief than Plummer?</p>
+
+<p>His next effort was to be appointed deputy United States marshal, and he
+received the indorsement of the leading men of Bannack. Plummer
+afterward tried several times to kill Nathaniel P. Langford, who caused
+his defeat, but was unsuccessful in getting the opportunity he sought.</p>
+
+<p>From Bannack to Salt Lake City was about five hundred miles. Mails by
+this time came in from Salt Lake City, which was the supply point. If a
+man wanted to send out gold to his people in the States, it had to go
+over this long trail across the wild regions. There was no mail service,
+and no express office nearer than Salt Lake. Merchants sent out their
+funds by private messenger. Every such journey was a risk of death.
+Plummer had clerks in every institution that was making money, and these
+kept him posted as to the times when shipments of dust were about to be
+made; they also told him when any well-staked miner was <!-- Page 119 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>going out to
+the States. Plummer's men were posted all along these mountain trails.
+No one will ever know how many men were killed in all on the Salt Lake
+trail.</p>
+
+<p>There was a stage also between Bannack and Virginia City, and this was
+regarded as a legitimate and regular booty producer by the gang.
+Whenever a rich passenger took stage, a confederate at the place put a
+mark on the vehicle so that it could be read at the next stop. At this
+point there was sure to be others of the gang, who attended to further
+details. Sometimes two or three thousand dollars would be taken from a
+single passenger. A stage often carried fifteen or twenty thousand
+dollars in dust. Plummer knew when and where and how each stage was
+robbed, but in his capacity as sheriff covered up the traces of all his
+associates.</p>
+
+<p>The robbers who did the work were usually masked, and although
+suspicions were rife and mutterings began to grow louder, there was no
+actual evidence against Plummer until one day he held up a young man by
+name of Tilden, who voiced his belief that he knew the man who had held
+him up. Further evidence was soon to follow. A pack-train, bound for
+Salt <!-- Page 120 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>Lake, had no less than eighty thousand dollars in dust in its
+charge, and Plummer had sent out Dutch John and Steve Marshland to hold
+up the train. The freighters were too plucky, and both the bandits were
+wounded, and so marked, although for the time they escaped. George Ives
+also was recognized by one or two victims and began to be watched on
+account of his numerous open murders.</p>
+
+<p>At length, the dead body of a young man named Tiebalt was found in a
+thicket near Alder Gulch, under circumstances showing a revolting
+murder. At last the slumbering spirit of the Vigilantes began to awaken.
+Two dozen men of the camp went out and arrested Long John, George Ives,
+Alex Carter, Whiskey Bill, Bob Zachary, and Johnny Cooper. These men
+were surprised in their camp, and among their long list of weapons were
+some that had been taken from men who had been robbed or murdered. These
+weapons were identified by friends. Old Tex was another man taken in
+charge, and George Hilderman yet another. All these men wanted a "jury
+trial," and wanted it at Virginia City, where Plummer would have
+official influence enough to get his associates released! The captors,
+however, were men from <!-- Page 121 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>Nevada, the other leading camp in Alder Gulch,
+and they took their prisoners there.</p>
+
+<p>At once a Plummer man hastened out on horseback to get the chief on the
+ground, riding all night across the mountains to Bannack to carry the
+news that the citizens had at last rebelled against anarchy, robbery,
+and murder. On the following morning, two thousand men had gathered at
+Nevada City, and had resolved to try the outlaws. As there was rivalry
+between Virginia and Nevada camps, a jury was made up of twenty-four
+men, twelve from each camp. The miners' court, most dread of all
+tribunals, was in session.</p>
+
+<p>Some forms of the law were observed. Long John was allowed to turn
+state's evidence. He swore that George Ives had killed Tiebalt, and
+declared that he shot him while Tiebalt was on his knees praying, after
+he had been told that he must die. Then a rope was put around his neck
+and he was dragged to a place of concealment in the thicket where the
+body was found. Tiebalt was not dead while so dragged, for his hands
+were found full of grass and twigs which he had clutched. Ives was
+condemned to death, and the law and order men were strong enough to
+suppress the armed disturbance at <!-- Page 122 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>once started by his friends, none of
+whom could realize that the patient citizens were at last taking the law
+into their own hands. A scaffold was improvised and Ives was hung,&mdash;the
+first of the Plummer gang to meet retribution. The others then in
+custody were allowed to go under milder sentences.</p>
+
+<p>The Vigilantes now organized with vigor and determination. One bit of
+testimony was added to another, and one man now dared to voice his
+suspicions to another. Twenty-five determined men set out to secure
+others of the gang now known to have been united in this long
+brotherhood. Some of these men were now fleeing the country, warned by
+the fate of Ives; but the Vigilantes took Red Yager and Buck Stinson and
+Ned Ray, two of them Plummer's deputies, as well as another confederate
+named Brown. The party stopped at the Lorain Ranch, near a cottonwood
+grove, and tried their prisoners without going into town. Red Yager
+confessed in full before he was hung, and it was on his testimony that
+the whole secret league of robbers was exposed and eventually brought to
+justice. He gave the following list:</p>
+
+<p>Henry Plummer was chief of the gang; Bill <!-- Page 123 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>Bunton, stool-pigeon and
+second in command; George Brown, secretary; Sam Bunton, roadster; Cyrus
+Skinner, fence, spy and roadster; George Shears, horse thief and
+roadster; Frank Parish, horse thief and roadster; Bill Hunter, telegraph
+man and roadster; Ned Ray, council-room keeper at Bannack City; George
+Ives, Stephen Marshland, Dutch John (Wagner), Alex Carter, Whiskey Bill
+(Graves), Johnny Cooper, Buck Stinson, Mexican Frank, Bob Zachary, Boone
+Helm, Clubfoot George (Lane), Billy Terwilliger, Gad Moore, were
+roadsters.</p>
+
+<p>The noose was now tightening around the neck of the outlaw, Henry
+Plummer, whose adroitness had so long stood him in good stead. The
+honest miners found that their sheriff was the leader of the outlaws!
+His doom was said then and there, with that of all these others.</p>
+
+<p>A party of the Virginia City law and order men slipped over to Bannack,
+Henry Plummer's home. In a few hours the news had spread of what had
+happened at the other camps, and a branch organization of the Vigilantes
+was formed for Bannack. Stinson and Ray were now arrested, and then
+Plummer himself, the chief, the brains of all this long-secret <!-- Page 124 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>band of
+marauders. He was surprised with his coat and arms off, and taken
+prisoner. A few moments later, he was facing a scaffold, where, as
+sheriff, he had lately hung a man. The law had no delays. No court could
+quibble here. Not all Plummer's wealth could save him now, nor all his
+intellect and cool audacity.</p>
+
+<p>An agony of remorse and fear now came upon the outlaw chief. He fell
+upon his knees, called upon God to save him, begged, pleaded, wept like
+a child, declared that he was too wicked to die thus soon and
+unprepared. It was useless. The full proof of all his many crimes was
+laid before him.</p>
+
+<p>Ray, writhing and cursing, was the first to be hanged. He got his finger
+under the rope around his neck and died hard, but died. Stinson, also
+cursing, went next. It was then time for Plummer, and those who had this
+work in hand felt compunction at hanging a man so able, so urbane and so
+commanding. None the less, he was told to prepare. He asked for time to
+pray, and was told to pray from the cross-beam. He said good-by to a
+friend or two, and asked his executioners to "give him a good drop." He
+seemed to fear suffering, he who had caused so much suffering. To oblige
+him, <!-- Page 125 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>the men lifted his body high up and let it fall, and he died with
+little struggle.</p>
+
+<p>To cut short a long story of bloody justice, it may be added that of the
+men named as guilty by Yager every one was arrested, tried, and hung by
+the Vigilantes. Plummer for some time must have dreaded detection, for
+he tried to cover up his guilt by writing back home to the States that
+he was in danger of being hanged on account of his Union sympathies. His
+family would not believe his guilt, and looked on him as a martyr. They
+sent out a brother and sister to look into the matter, but these too
+found proof which left them no chance to doubt. The whole ghastly
+revelation of a misspent life lay before them. Even Plummer's wife, whom
+he loved very much and who was a good woman, was at last convinced of
+what at first she could not believe. Plummer had been able to conceal
+from even his wife the least suspicion that he was not an honorable man.
+His wife was east in the States at the time of his death.</p>
+
+<p>Plummer went under his true name. George Ives was a Wisconsin boy from
+near Racine. Both he and Plummer were twenty-seven years of age when
+killed, but they had compressed <!-- Page 126 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>much evil into so short a span. Plummer
+himself was a master of men, a brave and cool spirit, an expert with
+weapons, and in all not a bad specimen of the bad man at his worst. He
+was a murderer, but after all was not enough a murderer. No outlaw of
+later years so closely resembled the great outlaw, John A. Murrell, as
+did Henry Plummer, but the latter differed in one regard:&mdash;he spared
+victims, who later arose to accuse him.</p>
+
+<p>The frontier has produced few bloodier records than Plummer's. He was
+principal or accessory, as has been stated, in more than one hundred
+murders, not to mention innumerable robberies and thefts. His life was
+lived out in scenes typical of the early Western frontier. The madness
+of adventure in new wild fields, the lust of gold and its unparalleled
+abundance drove to crime men who might have been respected and of note
+in proper ranks of life and in other surroundings.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page 127 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Chapter_VIII" id="Chapter_VIII"></a>Chapter VIII</h2>
+
+<p>Boone Helm&mdash;<i>A Murderer, Cannibal, and Robber</i>&mdash;<i>A Typical Specimen of
+Absolute Human Depravity</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p>Henry Plummer was what might be called a good instance of the gentleman
+desperado, if such a thing be possible; a man of at least a certain
+amount of refinement, and certainly one who, under different
+surroundings, might have led a different life. For the sake of contrast,
+if for nothing else, we may take the case of Boone Helm, one of
+Plummer's gang, who was the opposite of Plummer in every way except the
+readiness to rob and kill. Boone Helm was bad, and nothing in the world
+could ever have made him anything but bad. He was, by birth and
+breeding, low, coarse, cruel, animal-like and utterly depraved, and for
+him no name but ruffian can fitly apply.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 128 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span></p><p>Helm was born in Kentucky, but his family moved to Missouri during his
+early youth, so that the boy was brought up on the borderland between
+civilization and the savage frontier; for this was about the time of the
+closing days of the old Santa F&eacute; Trail, and the towns of Independence
+and Westport were still sending out their wagon trains to the far
+mountain regions. By the time Boone Helm was grown, and soon after his
+marriage, the great gold craze of California broke out, and he joined
+the rush westward. Already he was a murderer, and already he had a
+reputation as a quarrelsome and dangerous man. He was of powerful build
+and turbulent temper, delighting in nothing so much as feats of
+strength, skill, and hardihood. His community was glad to be rid of him,
+as was, indeed, any community in which he ever lived.</p>
+
+<p>In the California diggings, Helm continued the line of life mapped out
+for him from birth. He met men of his own kidney there, and was ever
+ready for a duel with weapons. In this way he killed several men, no one
+knows how many; but this sort of thing was so common in the case of so
+many men in those days that little attention was paid to it. It must
+have <!-- Page 129 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>been a very brutal murder which at length caused him to flee the
+Coast to escape the vengeance of the miners. He headed north and east,
+after a fashion of the times following the California boom, and was
+bound for the mountain placers in 1853, when he is recorded as appearing
+at the Dalles, Oregon. He and a half-dozen companions, whom he had
+picked up on the way, and most of whom were strangers to each other, now
+started out for Fort Hall, Idaho, intending to go from there to a point
+below Salt Lake City.</p>
+
+<p>The beginning of the terrible mountain winter season caught these men
+somewhere west of the main range in eastern Oregon, in the depths of as
+rugged a mountain region as any of the West. They were on horseback, and
+so could carry small provisions; but in some way they pushed on deeper
+and deeper into the mountains, until they got to the Bannack river,
+where they were attacked by Indians and chased into a country none of
+them knew. At last they got over east as far as the Soda Springs on the
+Bear river, where they were on well-known ground. By this time, however,
+their horses had given out, and their food was exhausted. They killed
+their horses, made <!-- Page 130 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>snowshoes with the hides, and sought to reach Fort
+Hall. The party was now reduced to one of those awful starving marches
+of the wilderness which are now and then chronicled in Western life.
+This meant that the weak must perish where they fell.</p>
+
+<p>The strength of Helm and one of the others, Burton, enabled them to push
+on ahead, leaving their companions behind in the mountains. Almost
+within reach of Fort Hall, Burton gave out and was left behind in an
+abandoned cabin. Helm pushed on into the old stockade, but found it also
+abandoned for the winter season, and he could get no food there. He then
+went back to where he had left Burton, and, according to his own report,
+he was trying to get wood for a fire when he heard a pistol-shot and
+returned to find that Burton had killed himself. He stayed on at this
+spot, and, like a hyena, preyed upon the dead body of his companion. He
+ate one leg of the body, and then, wrapping up the other in a piece of
+old shirt, threw it across his shoulder and started on further east. He
+had, before this on the march, declared to the party that he had
+practiced cannibalism at an earlier time, and proposed to do so again if
+it became necessary on this trip across the mountains. <!-- Page 131 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>His calm threat
+was now verified. Helm was found at last at an Indian camp by John W.
+Powell, who learned that he was as hard a character as he had ever run
+across. None the less, he took care of Helm, gave him food and clothes,
+and took him to the settlements around Salt Lake. Powell found that Helm
+had a bag containing over fourteen hundred dollars in coin, which he had
+carried across the divide with him through all his hardships. He would
+take no pay from Helm, and the latter never even thanked him for his
+kindness, but left him as soon as he reached the Mormon settlements.</p>
+
+<p>Here the abandoned ruffian boasted of what he had done, and settled down
+for a brief time to the customary enjoyments of the rough when in town.
+He spent his money, hired out as a Danite, killed a couple of men whom
+the Mormons wanted removed, and soon got so bad that he had to leave.
+Once more he headed west to California, and once more he started back
+north from San Francisco, for reasons satisfactory to himself. While in
+California, as was later learned, he undertook to rob and kill a man at
+an outlying ranch, who had taken him in and befriended him when he was
+in need <!-- Page 132 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>and in flight from vengeance. He showed no understanding of the
+feeling of gratitude, no matter what was done for him or how great was
+his own extremity.</p>
+
+<p>In Oregon Helm went back to robbery as his customary means of support,
+and he killed several men at this time of his life, how many will never
+be known. In 1862, as the mountain placers were now beginning to draw
+the crowds of mining men, it was natural that Boone Helm should show up
+at Florence. Here he killed a man in cold blood, in treachery, while his
+enemy was not armed, and after their quarrel had been compromised. This
+victim was Dutch Fred, a man of reputation as a fighter, but he had
+never offended Helm, who killed him at the instigation of an enemy of
+his victim, and possibly for hire. He shot Fred while the latter stood
+looking him in the face, unarmed, and, missing him with the first shot,
+took deliberate aim with the second and murdered his man in cold blood.</p>
+
+<p>This was pretty bad even for Florence, and he had to leave. That fall he
+turned up far to the north, on the Fraser river, in British Columbia.
+Here he was once more reduced to danger on a starving foot march in the
+wilderness, <!-- Page 133 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>and here, once more, he was guilty of eating the body of
+his companion, whom he is supposed to have slain. He was sent back by
+the British authorities, and for a time was held at Portland, Oregon,
+for safe keeping. Later he was tried at Florence for killing Dutch Fred,
+but the witnesses had disappeared, and people had long ago lost interest
+in the crime by reason of others more recent. Helm escaped justice and
+was supposed to have gone to Texas; but he soon appeared in the several
+settlements which have been mentioned in the foregoing pages, and moved
+from one to the other. He killed many more men, how many in all was
+never known.</p>
+
+<p>The courage and hardihood of Boone Helm were in evidence to the close of
+his life. Three men of the Vigilantes did the dangerous work of
+arresting him, and took him by closing in on him as he stood in the
+street talking. "If I'd had a chance," said he, "or if I had guessed
+what you all were up to, you'd never have taken me." He claimed not to
+know what was wanted of him when brought before the judges of the
+Vigilante court, and solemnly declared that he had never killed a man in
+all his life! They made him kiss the Bible and swear to this <!-- Page 134 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>over again
+just to see to what lengths his perjured and depraved soul would go. He
+swore on the Bible with perfect calmness! His captors were not moved by
+this, and indeed Helm was little expectant that they would be. He called
+aside one of them whom he knew, declined a clergyman, and confessed to a
+murder or so in Missouri and in California, admitted that he had been
+imprisoned once or twice, but denied that he had been a road agent. He
+accused some of his warmest friends of the latter crime. Jack Gallegher,
+also under arrest, heard him thus incriminate himself and others of the
+gang and called him all the names in the calendar, telling him he ought
+to die.</p>
+
+<p>"I have looked at death in all forms," said Helm, coolly, "and I am not
+afraid to die." He then asked for a glass of whiskey, as did a good many
+of these murderers when they were brought to the gallows. From that time
+on he was cool and unconcerned, and showed a finish worthy of one
+ambitious to be thought wholly bad.</p>
+
+<p>There were six thousand men assembled in Virginia City to see the
+executions of these criminals, who were fast being rounded up and hung
+by the citizens. The place of execution <!-- Page 135 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>was in a half-finished log
+building. The ropes were passed over the ridge-pole, and, as the front
+of the building was open, a full view was offered of the murderers as
+they stood on the boxes arranged for the drops. Boone Helm looked around
+at his friends placed for death, and told Jack Gallegher to "stop making
+such a fuss." "There's no use being afraid to die," said he; and indeed
+there probably never lived a man more actually devoid of all sense of
+fear. He valued neither the life of others nor his own. He saw that the
+end had come, and was careless about the rest. He had a sore finger,
+which was tied up, and this seemed to trouble him more than anything
+else. There was some delay about the confessions and the last offices of
+those who prayed for the condemned, and this seemed to irritate Boone
+Helm.</p>
+
+<p>"For God's sake," said he, "if you're going to hang me, I want you to do
+it and get through with it. If not, I want you to tie up my finger for
+me."</p>
+
+<p>"Give me that overcoat of yours, Jack," he said to Gallegher, as the
+latter was stripped for the noose.</p>
+
+<p>"You won't need it now," replied Gallegher, who was dying blasphemous.
+About then, <!-- Page 136 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>George Lane, one of the line of men about to be hung,
+jumped off his box on his own account. "There's one gone to hell,"
+remarked Boone Helm, philosophically. Gallegher was hanged next, and as
+he struggled his former friend watched him calmly. "Kick away, old
+fellow," said Boone Helm. Then, as though suddenly resolved to end it,
+he commented, "My turn next. I'll be in hell with you in a minute!"</p>
+
+<p>Boone Helm was a Confederate and a bitter one, and this seems to have
+remained with him to the last. "Every man for his principles!" he
+shouted. "Hurrah for Jeff Davis! Let her rip!" He sprang off the box;
+and so he finished, utterly hard and reckless to the last.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page 137 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Chapter_IX" id="Chapter_IX"></a>Chapter IX</h2>
+
+<p>Death Scenes of Desperadoes&mdash;<i>How Bad Men Died</i>&mdash;<i>The Last Moments of
+Desperadoes Who Finished on the Scaffold</i>&mdash;<i>Utterances of Terror, of
+Defiance, and of Cowardice</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p>There is always a grim sort of curiosity regarding the way in which
+notoriously desperate men meet their end; and perhaps this is as natural
+as is the curiosity regarding the manner in which they lived. "Did he
+die game?" is one of the questions asked by bad men among themselves.
+"Did he die with his boots on?" is another. The last was the test of
+actual or, as it were, of professional badness. One who admitted himself
+bad was willing to die with his boots on. Honest men were not, and more
+than one early Western man fatally shot had his friends take off his
+boots before he died, so that he might not go with the stain of
+desperadoism attached to his name.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 138 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span></p><p>Some bad men died unrepentant and defiant. Others broke down and wept
+and begged. A great oblivion enshrouds most of these utterances, for few
+Vigilante movements ever reached importance enough to permit those who
+participated to make publicly known their own participation in them.
+Indeed, no man ever concerned in a law and order execution ever liked to
+talk about it. Tradition, however, has preserved the exact utterances of
+many bad men. Report is preserved, in a general way, of many of the
+rustlers hung by the cattle men in the "regulator" movement in Montana,
+Wyoming, and Nebraska in the late '70's. "Give me a chew of tobacco,
+folks," said one. "Meet you in hell, fellows," remarked others of these
+rustlers when the last moment arrived. "So-long, boys," was a not
+infrequent remark as the noose tightened. Many of these men were brave,
+and some of them were hung for what they considered no crime.</p>
+
+<p>Henry Plummer, whose fate has been described in a previous chapter, was
+one of those who died in a sense of guilt and terror. His was a nature
+of some sensitiveness, not callous like that of Boone Helm. Plummer
+begged for life on any terms, asked the Vigilantes to <!-- Page 139 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>cut off his
+ears and hands and tongue, anything to mark him and leave him helpless,
+but to leave him alive. He protested that he was too wicked to die, fell
+on his knees, cried aloud, promised, besought. On the whole, his end
+hardly left him enshrouded with much glamor of courage; although the
+latter term is relative in the bad man, who might be brave at one time
+and cowardly at another, as was often proved.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"><a name="i157">
+<img src="images/i157.jpg" class="jpg" width="600" height="353" alt="THE SCENE OF MANY HANGINGS" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE SCENE OF MANY HANGINGS</span>
+</a></div>
+
+<p>Ned Ray and Buck Stinson died full of profanity and curses, heaping upon
+their executioners all manner of abuse. They seemed to be animated by no
+understanding of a life hereafter, and were concerned only in their
+animal instinct to hold on to this one as long as they might. Yet
+Stinson, of a good Indiana family, was a bright and studious and
+well-read boy, of whom many good things had been predicted.</p>
+
+<p>Dutch John, when faced with death, acted much as his chief, Henry
+Plummer, had done. He begged and pleaded, and asked for mutilation,
+disfigurement, anything, if only he might still live. But, like Plummer,
+at the very last moment he pulled together and died calmly. "How long
+will it take me to die?" he asked. "I have never seen anyone hanged."
+They told <!-- Page 140 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>him it would be very short and that he would not suffer much,
+and this seemed to please him. Nearly all these desperadoes seemed to
+dread death by hanging. The Territory of Utah allowed a felon convicted
+under death penalty to choose the manner of his death, whether by
+hanging, beheading, or shooting; but no record remains of any prisoner
+who did not choose death by shooting. A curiosity as to the sensation of
+hanging was evinced in the words of several who were hung by Vigilantes.</p>
+
+<p>In the largest hanging made in this Montana work, there were five men
+executed one after the other: Clubfoot George, Hayes Lyons, Jack
+Gallegher, Boone Helm, and Frank Parish, all known to be members of the
+Plummer gang. George and Parish at first declared that they were
+innocent&mdash;the first word of most of these men when they were
+apprehended. Parish died silent. George had spent some hours with a
+clergyman, and was apparently repentant. Just as he reached the box, he
+saw a friend peering through a crack in the wall. "Good-by, old fellow,"
+he called out, and sprang to his own death without waiting for the box
+to be pulled from under his feet.</p>
+
+<p>Hayes Lyons asked to see his mistress to say <!-- Page 141 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>good-by to her before he
+died, but was refused. He kept on pleading for his life to the very last
+instant, after he had told the men to take his body to his mistress for
+burial. This woman was really the cause of Lyons' undoing. He had been
+warned, and would have left the country but for her. A woman was very
+often the cause of a desperado's apprehension.</p>
+
+<p>Jack Gallegher in his last moments was, if possible, more repulsive even
+than Boone Helm. The latter was brave, but Gallegher was a coward, and
+spent his time in cursing his captors and pitying himself. He tried to
+be merry. "How do I look with a halter around my neck?" he asked
+facetiously of a bystander. He asked often for whiskey and this was
+given him. A moment later he said, "I want one more drink of whiskey
+before I die." This was when the noose was tight around his neck, and
+the men were disgusted with him for the remark. One remarked, "Give him
+the whiskey"; so the rope, which was passed over the beam above him and
+fastened to a side log of the building, was loosened to oblige him.
+"Slack off the rope, can't you," cried Gallegher, "and let a man have a
+parting drink." He bent his head down against the rope and drank <!-- Page 142 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>a
+tumblerful of whiskey at a gulp. Then he called down curses on the men
+who were about him, and kept it up until they cut him short by jerking
+away the box from under his feet.</p>
+
+<p>A peculiar instance of unconscious, but grim, humor was afforded at
+Gallegher's execution. Just as he was led to the box and ordered to
+climb up, he drew a pocket-knife and declared he would kill himself and
+not be hanged in public. A Vigilante covered him with a six-shooter.
+"Drop that, Jack," he exclaimed, "or I'll blow your head off." So
+Gallegher, having the choice of death between shooting, hanging or
+beheading, chose hanging after all! He was a coward.</p>
+
+<p>Cy Skinner, when on the way to the scaffold, broke and ran, calling on
+his captors to shoot. They declined, and hanged him. Alex Carter, who
+was on the fatal line with Skinner in that lot, was disgusted with him
+for running. He asked for a smoke while the men were waiting, and died
+with a lie on his lips&mdash;"I am innocent." That is not an infrequent
+declaration of criminals at the last. The lie is only a blind clinging
+to the last possible means of escape, and is the same as the instinct
+for self-preservation, a crime swallowed up in guilt.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 143 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span></p><p>Johnny Cooper wanted a "good smoke" before he died, and was given it.
+Bob Zachary died without fear, and praying forgiveness on his
+executioners. Steve Marshland asked to be pardoned because of his youth.
+"You should have thought of that before," was the grim reply. He was
+adjudged old enough to die, as he had been old enough to kill.</p>
+
+<p>George Shears was one of the gamest of the lot. He seemed indifferent
+about it all after his capture, and, when he was told that he was to be
+hanged, he remarked that he ought to be glad it was no worse. He was
+executed in the barn at a ranch where he was caught, and, conveniences
+being few, a ladder was used instead of a box or other drop. He was told
+to ascend the latter, and did so without the least hesitation or
+evidence of concern. "Gentlemen," said he, "I am not used to this
+business, never having been hung before. Shall I jump off or slide off?"
+They told him to "jump, of course," and he took this advice. "All right.
+Good-by!" he said, and sprang off with unconcern.</p>
+
+<p>Whiskey Bill was not given much chance for last words. He was hung from
+horseback, the noose being dropped down from a tree to his neck as he
+sat on a horse behind one of the <!-- Page 144 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>Vigilantes. "Good-by, Bill," was the
+remark of the latter, as he spurred his horse and left Bill hanging.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most singular phenomena of these executions was that of Bill
+Hunter, who, while hanging by the neck, went through all the motions of
+drawing and firing his six-shooter six times. Whether the action was
+conscious or unconscious it is impossible to tell.</p>
+
+<p>Bill Bunton resisted arrest and was pugnacious, of course declaring his
+innocence. At the last he showed great gameness. He was particular about
+the manner in which the knot of the rope was adjusted to his neck,
+seeming, as did many of these men, to dread any suffering while hanging.
+He asked if he might jump off the platform himself, and was told he
+might if he liked. "I care no more for hanging," he explained, "than I
+do for taking a drink of water, but I'd like to have my neck broken. I'd
+like to have a mountain three hundred feet high to jump off from. Now,
+I'll give you the time: One&mdash;two&mdash;three. Here goes!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page 145 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Chapter_X" id="Chapter_X"></a>Chapter X</h2>
+
+<p>Joseph A. Slade&mdash;<i>A Man with a Newspaper Reputation</i>&mdash;<i>Bad, but Not as
+Bad as Painted</i>&mdash;<i>Hero of the Overland Express Route</i>&mdash;<i>A Product of
+Courage Plus Whiskey, and the End of the Product</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p>One of the best-known desperadoes the West ever produced was Joseph A.
+Slade, agent of the Overland stage line on the central or mountain
+division, about 1860, and hence in charge of large responsibilities in a
+strip of country more than six hundred miles in extent, which possessed
+all the ingredients for trouble in plenty. Slade lived, in the heyday of
+his career, just about the time when men from the East were beginning to
+write about the newly discovered life of the West. Bret Harte had left
+his indelible stamp upon the literature of the land, and Mark Twain was
+soon to spread widely his impressions of life as seen in "Roughing It";
+while <!-- Page 146 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>countless newspaper men and book writers were edging out and
+getting hearsay stories of things known at first hand by a very few
+careful and conscientious writers.</p>
+
+<p>The hearsay man engaged in discovering the West always clung to the
+regular lines of travel; and almost every one who passed across the
+mountains on the Overland stage line would hear stories about the
+desperate character of Slade. These stories grew by newspaper
+multiplication, until at length the man was owner of the reputation of a
+fiend, a ghoul, and a murderer. There was a wide difference between this
+and the truth. As a matter of fact, there were many worse desperadoes on
+the border.</p>
+
+<p>Slade was born at Carlisle, Illinois, and served in the Mexican War in
+1848. He appears to have gone into the Overland service in 1859. At once
+he plunged into the business of the stage line, and soon became a terror
+to the thieves and outlaws, several of whom he was the means of having
+shot or hung, although he himself was nothing of a man-hunter at the
+time; and indeed, in all his life he killed but one man&mdash;a case of a
+reputation beyond desert, and an instance of a reputation fostered by
+admiring but ignorant writers.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 147 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span></p><p>Slade was reported to have tied one of his enemies, Jules Reni, more
+commonly called Jules, to the stake, and to have tortured him for a day,
+shooting him to pieces bit by bit, and cutting off his ears, one of
+which he always afterward wore in his pocket as a souvenir. There was
+little foundation for this reputation beyond the fact that he did kill
+Jules, and did it after Jules had been captured and disarmed by other
+men. But he had been threatened time and again by Jules, and was once
+shot and left for dead by the latter, who emptied a pistol and a shotgun
+at Slade, and left him lying with thirteen bullets and buckshot in his
+body. Jules thought he did not need to shoot Slade any more after that,
+and gave directions for his burial as soon as he should have died. At
+that Slade rose on his elbow and promised Jules he would live and would
+wear one of his, Jules', ears on his watch chain; a threat which no
+doubt gave rise to a certain part of his ghastly reputation. Jules was
+hung for a while by the stage people, but was let down and released on
+promise of leaving the country never to return. He did not keep his
+promise, and it had been better for him if he had.</p>
+
+<p>Jules Reni was a big Frenchman, one of that <!-- Page 148 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>sort of early ranchers who
+were owners of small ranches and a limited number of cattle and
+horses&mdash;just enough to act as a shield for thefts of live stock, and to
+offer encouragement to such thefts. Before long Jules was back at his
+old stamping-grounds, where he was looked on as something of a bully;
+and at once he renewed his threats against Slade.</p>
+
+<p>Slade went to the officers of the military post at Laramie, the only
+kind of authority then in the land, which had no sort of courts or
+officers, and asked them what he should do. They told him to have Jules
+captured and then to kill him, else Jules would do the same for him.
+Slade sent four men out to the ranch where Jules was stopping, about
+twelve miles from Laramie, while he followed in the stage-coach. These
+men captured Jules at a ranch a little farther down the line, and left
+him prisoner at the stage station. Here Slade found him in the corral, a
+prisoner, unarmed and at his mercy, and without hesitation he shot him,
+the ball striking him in the mouth. His victim fell and feigned death,
+but Slade&mdash;who was always described as a good pistol shot&mdash;saw that he
+was not killed, and told him he should have time to make his will if he
+desired. There is color in the charge <!-- Page 149 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>of deliberate cruelty, but
+perhaps rude warrant for the cruelty, under the circumstances of
+treachery in which Jules had pursued Slade. At least, some time elapsed
+while a man was running back and forward from the house to the corral
+with pen and ink and paper. Jules never signed his will. When the last
+penful of ink came out to the corral, Jules was dead, shot through the
+head by Slade. This looks like cruelty of an unnecessary sort, and like
+taunting a helpless victim; but here the warrant for all the Slade sort
+of stories seems to end, and there is no evidence of his mutilating his
+victim, as was often described.</p>
+
+<p>Slade went back to the officers of Fort Laramie, and they said he had
+done right and did not detain him. Nor did any of Jules' friends ever
+molest him. He returned to his work on the Overland. After this he grew
+more turbulent, and was guilty of high-handed outrages and of a general
+disposition to run things wherever he went. The officers at Fort Halleck
+arrested him and refused to turn him over to the stage line unless the
+latter agreed to discharge him. This was done, and now Slade, out of
+work, began to be bad at heart. He took to drink and drifting, and so at
+last turned <!-- Page 150 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>up at the Beaverhead diggings in 1863, not much different
+from many others of the bad folk to be found there.</p>
+
+<p>Quiet enough when sober, Slade was a maniac in drink, and this latter
+became his habitual condition. Now and again he sobered up, and he
+always was a business man and animated by an ambition to get on in the
+world. He worked here and there in different capacities, and at last
+settled on a ranch a dozen miles or so from Virginia City, where he
+lived with his wife, a robust, fine-looking woman of great courage and
+very considerable beauty, of whom he was passionately fond; although she
+lived almost alone in the remote cabin in the mountains, while Slade
+pursued his avocations, such as they were, in the settlements along
+Alder Gulch.</p>
+
+<p>Slade now began to grow ugly and hard, and to exult in terrorizing the
+hard men of those hard towns. He would strike a man in the face while
+drinking with him, would rob his friends while playing cards, would ride
+into the saloons and break up the furniture, and destroy property with
+seeming exultation at his own maliciousness. He was often arrested,
+warned, and fined; and sometimes he defied such officers as went after
+him and refused to be arrested. His <!-- Page 151 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>whole conduct made him a menace to
+the peace of this little community, which was now endeavoring to become
+more decent, and he fell under the fatal scrutiny of the Vigilantes, who
+concluded that the best thing to do was to hang Slade. He had never
+killed anyone as yet, although he had abused many; but it was sure that
+he would kill some one if allowed to run on; and, moreover, it was
+humiliating to have one man trying to run the town and doing as he
+pleased. Slade was to learn what society means, and what the social
+compact means, as did many of these wild men who had been running as
+savages outside of and independent of the law. Slade got wind of the
+deliberations of the Committee, as well he might when six hundred men
+came down from Nevada Camp to Virginia City to help in the court of the
+miners, before which Slade was now to come. It was the Nevada Vigilantes
+who were most strongly of the belief that death and not banishment was
+the proper punishment for Slade. The leader of the marching men calmly
+told Slade that the Committee had decided to hang him; and, once the
+news was sure, Slade broke out into lamentations.</p>
+
+<p>This was often the case with men who had <!-- Page 152 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>been bullies and terrors. They
+weakened when in the hands of a stronger power. Slade crept about on his
+hands and knees, begging like a baby. "My God! My God!" he cried. "Must
+I die? Oh, my poor wife, my poor wife! My God, men, you can't mean that
+I'm to die!"</p>
+
+<p>They did mean it, and neither his importunities nor those of his friends
+had avail. His life had been too rough and violent and was too full of
+menace to others. He had had his fair frontier chance and had misused
+it. Some wept at his prayers, but none relented. In broad daylight, the
+procession moved down the street, and soon Slade was swinging from the
+beam of a corral gate, one more example of the truth that when man
+belongs to society he owes duty to society and else must suffer at its
+hands. This was the law.</p>
+
+<p>Slade's wife was sent for and reached town soon after Slade's body was
+cut down and laid out. She loaded the Vigilantes with imprecations, and
+showed the most heartbroken grief. The two had been very deeply
+attached. She was especially regretful that Slade had been hanged and
+not shot. He was worth a better death than that, she protested.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 153 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span></p><p>Slade's body was preserved in alcohol and kept out at the lone ranch
+cabin all that winter. In the spring it was sent down to Salt Lake City
+and buried there. As that was a prominent point on the overland trail,
+the tourists did the rest. The saga of Slade as a bad man was widely
+disseminated.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page 154 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Chapter_XI" id="Chapter_XI"></a>Chapter XI</h2>
+
+<p>The Desperado of the Plains&mdash;<i>Lawlessness Founded on Loose
+Methods</i>&mdash;<i>The Rustlers of the Cow Country</i>&mdash;<i>Excuses for Their
+Acts</i>&mdash;<i>The Approach of the Commercial West</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p>One pronounced feature of early Western life will have been remarked in
+the story of the mountain settlements with which we have been concerned,
+and that is the transient and migratory character of the population. It
+is astonishing what distances were traveled by the bold men who followed
+the mining stampedes all over the wilderness of the upper Rockies, in
+spite of the unspeakable hardships of a region where travel at its best
+was rude, and travel at its worst well-nigh an impossibility. The West
+was first peopled by wanderers, nomads, even in its mountain regions,
+which usually attach their population to <!-- Page 155 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>themselves and cut off the
+disposition to roam. This nomad nature of the adventurers made law
+almost an impossible thing. A town was organized and then abandoned, on
+the spur of necessity or rumor. Property was unstable, taxes impossible,
+and any corps of executive officers difficult of maintenance. Before
+there can be law there must be an attached population.</p>
+
+<p>The lawlessness of the real West was therefore much a matter of
+conditions after all, rather than of morals. It proved above all things
+that human nature is very much akin, and that good men may go wrong when
+sufficiently tempted by great wealth left unguarded. The first and
+second decades after the close of the civil war found the great placers
+of the Rockies and Sierras exhausted, and quartz mines taking their
+place. The same period, as has been shown, marked the advent of the
+great cattle herds from the South upon the upper ranges of the
+territories beyond the Missouri river. By this time, the plains began to
+call to the adventurers as the mines recently had called.</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, was wealth, loose, unattached, apparently almost unowned,
+nomad wealth, and waiting for a nomad population to share <!-- Page 156 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>it in one way
+or another. Once more, the home was lacking, the permanent abode;
+wherefore, once more the law was also lacking, and man ruled himself
+after the ancient savage ways. By this time frontiersmen were well armed
+with repeating weapons, which now used fixed ammunition. There appeared
+on the plains more and better armed men than were ever known,
+unorganized, in any land at any period of the earth's history; and the
+plains took up what the mountains had begun in wild and desperate deeds.</p>
+
+<p>The only property on the arid plains at that time was that of live
+stock. Agriculture had not come, and it was supposed could never come.
+The vast herds of cattle from the lower ranges, Texas and Mexico, pushed
+north to meet the railroads, now springing westward across the plains;
+but a large proportion of these cattle were used as breeding stock to
+furnish the upper cow range with horned population. Colorado, Wyoming,
+Montana, western Nebraska, the Dakotas, discovered that they could raise
+range cattle as well as the southern ranges, and fatten them far better;
+so presently thousands upon thousands of cattle were turned loose,
+without a fence in those thousands of <!-- Page 157 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>miles, to exist as best they
+might, and guarded as best might be by a class of men as nomadic as
+their herds. These cattle were cheap at that time, and they made a
+general source of food supply much appreciated in a land but just
+depopulated of its buffalo. For a long time it was but a venial crime to
+kill a cow and eat it if one were hungry. A man's horse was sacred, but
+his cow was not, because there were so many cows, and they were shifting
+and changing about so much at best.</p>
+
+<p>The ownership of these herds was widely scattered and difficult to
+trace. A man might live in Texas and have herds in Montana, and <i>vice
+versa</i>. His property right was known only by the brand upon the animal,
+his being but the tenure of a sign.</p>
+
+<p>"The respect for this sign was the whole creed of the cattle trade.
+Without a fence, without an atom of actual control, the cattle man held
+his property absolutely. It mingled with the property of others, but it
+was never confused therewith. It wandered a hundred miles from him, and
+he knew not where it was, but it was surely his and sure to find him. To
+touch it was crime. To appropriate it meant punishment. Common necessity
+made common <!-- Page 158 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>custom, common custom made common law, and common law made
+statutory law."<a name="FNanchor_E_5" id="FNanchor_E_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_E_5" class="fnanchor">[E]</a></p>
+
+
+
+<p>The old <i>fierro</i> or iron mark of the Spanish cattle owner, and his
+<i>venta</i> or sale-brand to another had become common law all over the
+Southwest when the Anglo-Saxon first struck that region. The Saxon
+accepted these customs as wise and rational, and soon they were the
+American law all over the American plains.</p>
+
+<p>The great bands of cattle ran almost free in the Southwest for many
+years, each carrying the brand of the owner, if the latter had ever seen
+it or cared to brand it. Many cattle roamed free without any brand
+whatever, and no one could tell who owned them. When the northern ranges
+opened, this question of unbranded cattle still remained, and the
+"maverick" industry was still held matter of sanction, there seeming to
+be enough for all, and the day being one of glorious freedom and plenty,
+the baronial day of the great and once unexhausted West.</p>
+
+<p>Now the <i>venta</i>, or brand indicating the sale of an animal to another
+owner, began to complicate matters to a certain extent. A purchaser
+<!-- Page 159 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>could put his own <i>fierro</i> brand on a cow, and that meant that he now
+owned it. But then some suspicious soul asked, "How shall we know whence
+such and such cows came, and how tell whether or not this man did not
+steal them outright from his neighbor's herd and put his own brand on
+them?" Here was the origin of the bill of sale, and also of the counter
+brand or "vent brand," as it is known upon the upper ranges. The owner
+duplicated his recorded brand upon another recorded part of the animal,
+and this meant his deed of conveyance, when taken together with the bill
+of sale over his commercial signature. Of course, several conveyances
+would leave the hide much scarred and hard to read; and, as there were
+"road brands" also used to protect the property while in transit from
+the South to the North or from the range to the market, the reading of
+the brands and the determination of ownership of the animal might be,
+and very often was, a nice matter, and one not always settled without
+argument; and argument in the West often meant bloodshed in those days.
+Some hard men started up in trade near the old cattle trails, and made a
+business of disputing brands with the trail drivers. Sometimes <!-- Page 160 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>they
+made good their claims, and sometimes they did not. There were graves
+almost in line from Texas to Montana.</p>
+
+<p>It is now perfectly easy to see what a wide and fertile field was here
+offered to men who did not want to observe the law. Here was property to
+be had without work, and property whose title could easily be called
+into question; whose ownership was a matter of testimony and record, to
+be sure, but testimony which could be erased or altered by the same
+means which once constituted it a record and sign. The brand was made
+with an iron, and it could be changed with an iron. A large and
+profitable industry arose in changing these brands. The rustler,
+brand-burner or brand-blotcher now became one of the new Western
+characters, and a new sort of bad-manism had its birth.</p>
+
+<p>"It is very easy to see how temptation was offered to the cow thief and
+'brand blotter.' Here were all these wild cattle running loose over the
+country. The imprint of a hot iron on a hide made the creature the
+property of the brander, provided no one else had branded it before. The
+time of priority was matter of proof. With the handy "running-iron" or
+straight rod, which was always attached to his <!-- Page 161 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>saddle when he rode out,
+could not the cow thief erase a former brand and put over it one of his
+own? Could he not, for instance, change a U into an O, or a V into a
+diamond, or a half-circle into a circle? Could he not, moreover, kill
+and skin an animal and sell the beef as his own? Between him and the
+owner was only this little mark. Between him and changing this mark was
+nothing but his moral principles. The range was very wide. Hardly a
+figure would show on that unwinking horizon all day long. And what was a
+heifer here and there?"</p>
+
+<p>Such was the temptation and opportunity which led many a man to step
+over the line between right and wrong. Their excuse lies in the fact
+that the line was newly drawn and that it was often vague and inexact.
+It was easy, from killing or rebranding an occasional cow, to see the
+profits of larger operation. The faithful cowboys who cared for these
+herds and protected them even with their lives in the interest of absent
+owners began in time to tire of working on a salary, and settled down
+into little ranches of their own, starting with a herd of cattle
+lawfully purchased and branded. An occasional maverick came across their
+range <!-- Page 162 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>and they branded it. A brand was faint and not legible, and they
+put their own iron over it. They learned that pyrography with a hot
+poker was very profitable. The rest was easy. The first step was the one
+that counted; but who could tell where that first step was taken?</p>
+
+<p>At any rate, cattle owners began to take notice of their cows as the
+prices went up, and they had laws made to protect property rapidly
+enhancing in value. Cow owners were required to have fixed or
+stencil-irons, and were forbidden to trace a pattern with a straight
+iron or "running-iron." Each ranch must have its own iron or stencil.
+Texas as early as the '60's and '70's passed laws forbidding the use of
+the running-iron altogether, so that after that it was not safe to be
+caught riding the range with a straight iron under the saddle flap. Any
+man so discovered had to do some quick explaining.</p>
+
+<p>The next step after this was the organization of the cattle associations
+in the several territories and states which made the home of the cattle
+trade. These associations banded together in a national association.
+Detectives were placed at the stockyards in Chicago and Kansas City,
+charged with the finding of cattle <!-- Page 163 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>stolen on the range and shipped with
+or without clean brands. In short, there had now grown up an armed and
+legal warfare between the cow men themselves&mdash;in the first place very
+large-handed thieves&mdash;and the rustlers and "little fellows" who were
+accused of being too liberal with their brand blotching. The prosecution
+of these men was undertaken with something of the old vigor that
+characterized the pursuit of horse thieves, with this difference, that,
+whereas all the world had hated a horse thief as a common enemy, very
+much of the world found excuse for the so-called rustler, who was known
+to be doing only what his accusers had done before him.</p>
+
+<p>There may be a certain interest attaching to the methods of the range
+riders of this day, and those who care to go into the history of the
+cattle trade in its early days are referred to the work earlier quoted,
+where the matter is more fully covered.<a name="FNanchor_F_6" id="FNanchor_F_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_F_6" class="fnanchor">[F]</a> Brief reference will suffice
+here.</p>
+
+<p>The rustler might brand with his own straight running-iron, as it were,
+writing over again the brand he wished to change; but this was clumsy
+and apt to be detected, for <!-- Page 164 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>the new wound would slough and look
+suspicious. A piece of red-hot hay wire or telegraph wire was a better
+tool, for this could be twisted into the shape of almost any registered
+brand, and it would so cunningly connect the edges of both that the
+whole mark would seem to be one scar of the same date. The fresh burn
+fitted in with the older one so that it was impossible to swear that it
+was not a part of the first brand mark. Yet another way of softening a
+fresh and fraudulent brand was to brand through a wet blanket with a
+heavy iron, which thus left a wound deep enough, but not apt to slough,
+and so betray a brand done long after the round-up, and hence subject to
+scrutiny.</p>
+
+<p>As to the ways in which brands were altered in their lines, these were
+many and most ingenious. A sample page will be sufficient to show the
+possibilities of the art by which the rustler set over to his own herds
+on the free range the cows of his far-away neighbor, whom, perhaps, he
+did not love as himself. The list on the opposite page is taken from
+"The Story of the Cowboy."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 318px;"><a name="i185">
+<img src="images/i185.jpg" class="jpg" width="318" height="400" alt="HOW THE RUSTLER WORKED
+The above plate illustrates the manner in which cow-brands were changed.
+The original brand appears in each case to the left, and the various
+alterations follow. It will be noted that with every change there is
+something added&mdash;the rule always adopted by the swindler" title="" />
+<span class="caption">HOW THE RUSTLER WORKED</span></a></div>
+
+<div class="blockquot2">The above plate illustrates the manner in which cow-brands were changed.
+The original brand appears in each case to the left, and the various
+alterations follow. It will be noted that with<br /> every change there is
+something added&mdash;the rule always adopted by the swindler</div>
+
+
+<p>Such, then, was the burglar of the range, the rustler, to whom most of
+the mysterious and <!-- Page 165 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>untraceable crimes were ascribed. Such also were
+the excuses to be offered for some of the men who did what to them did
+not seem wrong acts. The sudden hostility of the newly-come cow men
+embittered and inflamed them, and from this it was easy and natural to
+the arbitrament of arms.</p>
+
+<p>The bad man of the plains dates to this era, and his acts may be
+attributed to these causes. There were to be found among these men many
+refugees and outlaws, as well as many better men gone wrong through
+point of view. Fierce and far were the battles between the rustlers and
+the cow barons. Commerce had its way at last. The lawless man had to go,
+and he had to go even before the law had come.</p>
+
+<p>The Vigilantes of the cattle range, organizing first in Montana and
+working southward, made a clean sweep in their work. In one campaign
+they killed somewhere between sixty and eighty men accused of cattle
+rustling. They hung thirteen men on one railroad bridge one morning in
+northwestern Nebraska. The statement is believed to be correct that, in
+the ten years from 1876 to 1886, they executed more men without process
+of law than have been executed under the law in all the United States
+<!-- Page 166 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>since then. These lynchings also were against the law. In short, it may
+perhaps begin to appear to those who study into the history of our
+earlier civilization that the term "law" is a very wide and lax and
+relative one, and one extremely difficult of exact application.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page 167 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Chapter_XII" id="Chapter_XII"></a>Chapter XII</h2>
+
+<p>Wild Bill Hickok&mdash;<i>The Beau Ideal of the Western Bad Man; Chivalric,
+Daring, Generous, and Game</i>&mdash;<i>A Type of the Early Western Frontier
+Officer</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p>As has been shown in preceding chapters, the Western plains were passed
+over and left unsettled until the advent of the railroads, which began
+to cross the plains coincident with the arrival of the great cattle
+herds which came up from the South after a market. This market did not
+wait for the completion of the railroads, but met the railroads more
+than half way; indeed, followed them quite across the plains. The
+frontier sheriff now came upon the Western stage as he had never done
+before. The bad man also sprang into sudden popular recognition, the
+more so because he was now accessible to view and within reach of the
+tourist and tenderfoot investigator <!-- Page 168 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>of the Western fauna. These were
+palmy days for the wild West.</p>
+
+<p>Unless it be a placer camp in the mountains, there is no harder
+collection of human beings to be found than that which gathers in tents
+and shanties at a temporary railway terminus of the frontier. Yet such
+were all the capitals of civilization in the earliest days. One town was
+like another. The history of Wichita and Newton and Fort Dodge was the
+history of Abilene and Ellsworth and Hays City and all the towns at the
+head of the advancing rails. The bad men and women of one moved on to
+the next, just as they did in the stampedes of placer days.</p>
+
+<p>To recount the history of one after another of these wild towns would be
+endless and perhaps wearisome. But this history has one peculiar feature
+not yet noted in our investigations. All these cow camps meant to be
+real towns some day. They meant to take the social compact. There came
+to each of these camps men bent upon making homes, and these men began
+to establish a law and order spirit and to set up a government. Indeed,
+the regular system of American government was there as soon as the
+railroad was there, and this law <!-- Page 169 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>was strong on its legislative and
+executive sides. The frontier sheriff or town marshal was there, the man
+for the place, as bold and hardy as the bold and hardy men he was to
+meet and subdue, as skilled with weapons, as willing to die; and upheld,
+moreover, with that sense of duty and of moral courage which is granted
+even to the most courageous of men when he feels that he has the
+sentiment of the majority of good people at his back.</p>
+
+<p>To describe the life of one Western town marshal, himself the best and
+most picturesque of them all, is to cover all this field sufficiently.
+There is but one man who can thus be chosen, and that is Wild Bill
+Hickok, better known for a generation as "Wild Bill," and properly
+accorded an honorable place in American history.</p>
+
+<p>The real name of Wild Bill was James Butler Hickok, and he was born in
+May, 1837, in La Salle county, Illinois. This brought his youth into the
+days of Western exploration and conquest, and the boy read of Carson and
+Fr&eacute;mont, then popular idols, with the result that he proposed a life of
+adventure for himself. He was eighteen years of age when he first saw
+the West as a fighting man under Jim Lane, of Free Soil fame, in the
+guerrilla days <!-- Page 170 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>of Kansas before the civil war. He made his mark, and
+was elected a constable in that dangerous country before he was twenty
+years of age. He was then a tall, "gangling" youth, six feet one in
+height, with yellow hair and blue eyes. He later developed into as
+splendid looking a man as ever trod on leather, muscular and agile as he
+was powerful and enduring. His features were clean-cut and expressive,
+his carriage erect and dignified, and no one ever looked less the
+conventional part of the bad man assigned in popular imagination. He was
+not a quarrelsome man, although a dangerous one, and his voice was low
+and even, showing a nervous system like that of Daniel Boone&mdash;"not
+agitated." It might have been supposed that he would be a natural master
+of weapons, and such was the case. The use of rifle and revolver was
+born in him, and perhaps no man of the frontier ever surpassed him in
+quick and accurate use of the heavy six-shooter. The religion of the
+frontier was not to miss, and rarely ever did he shoot except he knew
+that he would not miss. The tale of his killings in single combat is the
+longest authentically assigned to any man in American history.</p>
+
+<p>After many experiences with the pro-slavery <!-- Page 171 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>folk from the border, Bill,
+or "Shanghai Bill," as he was then known&mdash;a nickname which clung for
+years&mdash;went stage driving for the Overland, and incidentally did some
+effective Indian fighting for his employers, finally, in the year 1861,
+settling down as station agent for the Overland at Rock Creek station,
+about fifty miles west of Topeka. He was really there as guard for the
+horse band, for all that region was full of horse thieves and
+cutthroats, and robberies and killings were common enough. It was here
+that there occurred his greatest fight, the greatest fight of one man
+against odds at close range that is mentioned in any history of any part
+of the world. There was never a battle like it known, nor is the West
+apt again to produce one matching it.</p>
+
+<p>The borderland of Kansas was at that time, as may be remembered, ground
+debated by the anti-slavery and pro-slavery factions, who still waged
+bitter war against one another, killing, burning, and pillaging without
+mercy. The civil war was then raging, and Confederates from Missouri
+were frequent visitors in eastern Kansas under one pretext or another,
+of which horse lifting was the one most common, it being held legitimate
+to prey upon the enemy <!-- Page 172 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span>as opportunity offered. Two border outlaws by
+the name of the McCandlas boys led a gang of hard men in enterprises of
+this nature, and these intended to run off the stage company's horses
+when they found they could not seduce Bill to join their number. He told
+them to come and take the horses if they could; and on the afternoon of
+December 16, 1861, ten of them, led by the McCandlas brothers, rode up
+to his dugout to do so. Bill was alone, his stableman being away
+hunting. He retreated to the dark interior of his dugout and got ready
+his weapons, a rifle, two six-shooters, and a knife.</p>
+
+<p>The assailants proceeded to batter in the door with a log, and as it
+fell in, Jim McCandlas, who must have been a brave man to undertake so
+foolhardy a thing against a man already known as a killer, sprang in at
+the opening. He, of course, was killed at once. This exhausted the
+rifle, and Bill picked up the six-shooters from the table and in three
+quick shots killed three more of the gang as they rushed in at the door.
+Four men were dead in less than that many seconds; but there were still
+six others left, all inside the dugout now, and all firing at him at a
+range of three feet. It was almost a miracle that, under such
+surroundings, <!-- Page 173 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>the man was not killed. Bill now was crowded too much
+to use his firearms, and took to the bowie, thrusting at one man and
+another as best he might. It is known among knife-fighters that a man
+will stand up under a lot of flesh-cutting and blood-letting until the
+blade strikes a bone. Then he seems to drop quickly if it be a deep and
+severe thrust. In this chance medley, the knife wounds inflicted on each
+other by Bill and his swarming foes did not at first drop their men; so
+that it must have been several minutes that all seven of them were mixed
+in a mass of shooting, thrusting, panting, and gasping humanity. Then
+Jack McCandlas swung his rifle barrel and struck Bill over the head,
+springing upon him with his knife as well. Bill got his hand on a
+six-shooter and killed him just as he would have struck. After that no
+one knows what happened, not even Bill himself, who got his name then
+and there. "I just got sort of wild," he said, describing it. "I thought
+my heart was on fire. I went out to the pump then to get a drink, and I
+was all cut and shot to pieces."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 268px;"><a name="i196">
+<img src="images/i196.jpg" width="268" height="400" alt="From a painting by John W. Norton
+WILD BILL HICKOK&#39;S DESPERATE FIGHT IN THE DUGOUT&mdash;ONE MAN AGAINST TEN" title="" />
+<span class="caption"><span style='font-size:small'>From a painting by John W. Norton</span><br />
+WILD BILL HICKOK&#39;S DESPERATE FIGHT IN THE DUGOUT&mdash;ONE MAN AGAINST TEN</span></a></div>
+
+
+<p>They called him Wild Bill after that, and he had earned the name. There
+were six dead men on the floor of the dugout. He had fairly <!-- Page 174 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>whipped the
+ten of them, and the four remaining had enough and fled from that awful
+hole in the ground. Two of these were badly wounded. Bill followed them
+to the door. His own weapons were exhausted or not at hand by this time,
+but his stableman came up just then with a rifle in his hands. Bill
+caught it from him, and, cut up as he was, fired and killed one of the
+wounded desperadoes as he tried to mount his horse. The other wounded
+man later died of his wounds. Eight men were killed by the one. The two
+who got to their horses and escaped were perhaps never in the dugout at
+all, for it was hardly large enough to hold another man had any wanted
+to get in.</p>
+
+<p>There is no record of any fighting man to equal this. It took Bill a
+year to recover from his wounds. The life of the open air and hard work
+brought many Western men through injuries which would be fatal in the
+States. The pure air of the plains had much to do with this. Bill now
+took service as wagon-master under General Fr&eacute;mont and managed to get
+attacked by a force of Confederates while on his way to Sedalia, the war
+being now in full swing. He fled and was pursued; but, shooting back
+with six-shooters, killed four <!-- Page 175 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>men. It will be seen that he had now in
+single fight killed twelve men, and he was very young. This tally did
+not cover Indians, of whom he had slain several. Although he did not
+enlist, he went into the army as an independent sharpshooter, just
+because the fighting was good, and his work at this was very deadly. In
+four hours at the Pea Ridge battle, where he lay behind a log, on a hill
+commanding the flat where the Confederates were formed, he is said to
+have killed thirty-five men, one of them the Confederate General
+McCullough. It was like shooting buffalo for him. He was charged by a
+company of the enemy, but was rescued by his own men.</p>
+
+<p>Not yet enlisting, Bill went in as a spy for General Curtis, and took
+the dangerous work of going into "Pap" Price's lines, among the
+touch-and-go Missourians and Arkansans, in search of information useful
+to the Union forces. Bill enlisted for business purposes in a company of
+Price's mounted rangers, got the knowledge desired, and fled, killing a
+Confederate sergeant by name of Lawson in his escape. Curtis sent him
+back again, this time into the forces of Kirby Smith, then in Texas, but
+reported soon to move up into Arkansas. Bill <!-- Page 176 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>enlisted again, and again
+showed his skill in the saddle, killing two men as he fled. Count up all
+his known victims to this time, and the tally would be at least
+sixty-two men; and Bill was then but twenty-five.</p>
+
+<p>A third time Curtis sent Bill back into the Confederate lines, this time
+into another part of Price's army. Here he was detected and arrested as
+a spy. Bound hand and foot in his death watch, he killed his captor
+after he had torn his hands free, and once more escaped. After that, he
+dared not go back again, for he was too well known and too difficult to
+disguise. He could not keep out of the fighting, however, and went as a
+scout and free lance with General Davis, during Price's second invasion
+of Missouri. He was not an enlisted man, and seems to have done pretty
+much as he liked. One day he rode out on his own hook, and was stopped
+by three men, who ordered him to halt and dismount. All three men had
+their hands on their revolvers; but, to show the difference between
+average men and a specialist, Bill killed two of them and fatally shot
+the other before they could get into action. His tally was now sixty-six
+men at least.</p>
+
+<p>Curtis now sent Bill out into Kansas to look <!-- Page 177 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>into a report that some
+Indians were about to join the Confederate forces. Bill got the news,
+and also engaged in a knife duel with the Sioux, Conquering Bear, whom
+he accused of trying to ambush him. It was a fair and desperate fight,
+with knives, and although Bill finally killed his man, he himself was so
+badly cut up that he came near dying, his arm being ripped from shoulder
+to elbow, a wound which it took years to mend. It is doubtful if any man
+ever survived such injuries as he did, for by this time he was a mass of
+scars from pistol and knife wounds. He had probably been in danger of
+his life more than a hundred times in personal difficulties; for the man
+with a reputation as a bad man has a reputation which needs continual
+defending.</p>
+
+<p>After the war, Bill lived from hand to mouth, like most frontier
+dwellers. It was at Springfield, Missouri, that another duel of his long
+list occurred, in which he killed Dave Tutt, a fine pistol shot and a
+man with social ambitions in badness. It was a fair fight in the town
+square by appointment. Bill killed his man and wheeled so quickly on
+Tutt's followers that Tutt had not had time to fall before Bill's
+six-shooter was turned the opposite way, and he <!-- Page 178 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>was asking Tutt's
+friends if they wanted any of it themselves. They did not. This fight
+was forced on Bill, and his quiet attempts to avoid it and his stern way
+of accepting it, when inevitable, won him high estimation on the border.
+Indeed, he was now known all over the country, and his like has not
+since been seen. He was still a splendid looking man, and as cool and
+quiet and modest as ever he had been.</p>
+
+<p>Bill now went to trapping in the less settled parts of Nebraska, and for
+a while he lived in peace, until he fell into a saloon row over some
+trivial matter and invited four of his opponents outside to fight him
+with pistols; the four were to fire at the word, and Bill to do the
+same&mdash;his pistol against their four. In this fight he killed one man at
+first fire, but he himself was shot through the shoulder and disabled in
+his right arm. He killed two more with his left hand and badly wounded
+the other. This was a fair fight also, and the only wonder is he was not
+killed; but he seemed never to consider odds, and literally he knew
+nothing but fight.</p>
+
+<p>His score was now seventy-two men, not counting Indians. He himself
+never reported how many Indians he and Buffalo Bill killed as scouts in
+the Black Kettle campaign under <!-- Page 179 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>Carr and Primrose, but the killing of
+Black Kettle himself was sometimes attributed to Wild Bill. The latter
+was badly wounded in the thigh with a lance, and it took a long time for
+this wound to heal. To give this hurt and others better opportunity for
+mending, Bill now took a trip back East to his home in Illinois. While
+East he found that he had a reputation, and he undertook to use it. He
+found no way of making a living, however, and he returned to the West,
+where he could better market his qualifications.</p>
+
+<p>At that time Hays City, Kansas, was one of the hardest towns on the
+frontier. It had more than a hundred gambling dives and saloons to its
+two thousand population, and murder was an ordinary thing. Hays needed a
+town marshal, and one who could shoot. Wild Bill was unanimously
+selected, and in six weeks he was obliged to kill Jack Strawhan for
+trying to shoot him. This he did by reason of his superior quickness
+with the six-shooter, for Strawhan was drawing first. Another bad man,
+Mulvey, started to run Hays, in whose peace and dignity Bill now felt a
+personal ownership. Covered by Mulvey's two revolvers, Bill found room
+for the lightning flash of time, which is all that is <!-- Page 180 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>needed by the
+real revolver genius, and killed Mulvey on the spot. His tally was now
+seventy-five men. He made it seventy-eight in a fight with a bunch of
+private soldiers, who called him a "long-hair"&mdash;a term very accurate, by
+the way, for Bill was proud of his long, blond hair, as was General
+Custer and many another man of the West at that time. In this fight,
+Bill was struck by seven pistol balls and barely escaped alive by flight
+to a ranch on the prairie near by. He lay there three weeks, while
+General Phil Sheridan had details out with orders to get him dead or
+alive. He later escaped in a box-car to another town, and his days as
+marshal of Hays were over.</p>
+
+<p>Bill now tried his hand at Wild West theatricals, seeing that already
+many Easterners were "daffy," as he called it, about the West; but he
+failed at this, and went back once more to the plains where he belonged.
+He was chosen marshal of Abilene, then the cow camp par excellence of
+the middle plains, and as tough a community as Hays had been.</p>
+
+<p>The wild men from the lower plains, fighting men, mad from whiskey and
+contact with the settlements' possibilities of long-denied indulgence,
+swarmed in the streets and dives, <!-- Page 181 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>mingling with desperadoes and toughs
+from all parts of the frontier. Those who have never lived in such a
+community will never be able by any description to understand its
+phenomena. It seems almost unbelievable that sober, steady-going America
+ever knew such days; but there they were, and not so long ago, for this
+was only 1870.</p>
+
+<p>Two days after Bill was elected marshal of Abilene, he killed a
+desperado who was "whooping-up" the town in customary fashion. That same
+night, he was on the street, in a dim light, when all at once he saw a
+man whisk around a corner, and saw something shine, as he thought, with
+the gleam of a weapon. As showing how quick were the hand and eye of the
+typical gun-man of the day, it may be stated that Bill killed this man
+in a flash, only to find later that it was a friend, and one of his own
+deputies. The man was only pulling a handkerchief from his pocket. Bill
+knew that he was watched every moment by men who wanted to kill him. He
+had his life in his hands all the time. For instance, he had next to
+kill the friend of the desperado whom he had shot. By this time, Abilene
+respected its new marshal; indeed, was rather proud of him. The reign
+<!-- Page 182 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span>of the bad man of the plains was at its height, and the professional
+man-killer, the specialist with firearms, was a figure here and there
+over wide regions. Among all these none compared with this unique
+specimen. He was generous, too, as he was deadly, for even yet he was
+supporting a McCandlas widow, and he always furnished funerals for his
+corpses. He had one more to furnish soon. Enemies down the range among
+the cow men made up a purse of five thousand dollars, and hired eight
+men to kill the town marshal and bring his heart back South. Bill heard
+of it, and literally made all of them jump off the railroad train where
+he met them. One was killed in the jump. His list of homicides was now
+eighty-one. He had never yet been arrested for murder, and his killing
+was in fair open fight, his life usually against large odds. He was a
+strange favorite of fortune, who seemed certainly to shield him
+round-about.</p>
+
+<p>Bill now went East for another try at theatricals, in which, happily, he
+was unsuccessful, and for which he felt a strong distaste. He was
+scared&mdash;on the stage; and when he saw what was expected of him he quit
+and went back once more to the West. He appeared at Cheyenne, <!-- Page 183 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>in the
+Black Hills, wandering thus from one point to another after the fashion
+of the frontier, where a man did many things and in many places. He had
+a little brush with a band of Indians, and killed four of them with four
+shots from his six-shooter, bringing his list in red and white to
+eighty-five men. He got away alive from the Black Hills with difficulty;
+but in 1876 he was back again at Deadwood, married now, and, one would
+have thought, ready to settle down.</p>
+
+<p>But the life of turbulence ends in turbulence. He who lives by the sword
+dies by the sword. Deadwood was as bad a place as any that could be
+found in the mining regions, and Bill was not an officer here, as he had
+been in Kansas towns. As marshal of Hays and Abilene and United States
+marshal later at Hays City, he had been a national character. He was at
+Deadwood for the time only plain Wild Bill, handsome, quiet, but ready
+for anything.</p>
+
+<p>Ready for anything but treachery! He himself had always fought fair and
+in the open. His men were shot in front. Not such was to be his fate. On
+the day of August 2, 1876, while he was sitting at a game of cards in a
+saloon, a hard citizen by name of Jack McCall <!-- Page 184 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>slipped up behind him,
+placed a pistol to the back of his head, and shot him dead before he
+knew he had an enemy near. The ball passed through Bill's head and out
+at the cheek, lodging in the arm of a man across the table.</p>
+
+<p>Bill had won a little money from McCall earlier in the day, and won it
+fairly, but the latter had a grudge, and was no doubt one of those
+disgruntled souls who "had it in" for all the rest of the world. He got
+away with the killing at the time, for a miners' court let him go. A few
+days later, he began to boast about his act, seeing what fame was his
+for ending so famous a life; but at Yankton they arrested him, tried him
+before a real court, convicted him, and hanged him promptly.</p>
+
+<p>Wild Bill's body was buried at Deadwood, and his grave, surrounded by a
+neat railing and marked by a monument, long remained one of the features
+of Deadwood. The monument and fence were disfigured by vandals who
+sought some memento of the greatest bad man ever in all likelihood seen
+upon the earth. His tally of eighty-five men seems large, but in fair
+probability it is not large enough. His main encounters are known
+historically. He killed a great many Indians at different times, but of
+<!-- Page 185 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>these no accurate estimate can be claimed. Nor is his list of victims
+as a sharpshooter in the army legitimately to be added to his record.
+Cutting out all doubtful instances, however, there remains no doubt that
+he killed between twenty and thirty men in personal combat in the open,
+and that never once was he tried in any court on a charge even of
+manslaughter.</p>
+
+<p>This record is not approached by that of any other known bad man. Many
+of them are credited with twenty men, a dozen men, and so forth; but
+when the records are sifted the list dwindles. It is doubted whether any
+other bad man in America ever actually killed twenty men in fair
+personal combat. Bill was not killed in fair fight, nor could McCall
+have hurt him had Bill suspected his intent.</p>
+
+<p>Hickok was about thirty-nine years old when killed, and he had averaged
+a little more than two men for each year of his entire life. He was
+well-known among army officers, and esteemed as a scout and a man, never
+regarded as a tough in any sense. He was a man of singular personal
+beauty. Of him General Custer, soon thereafter to fall a victim himself
+upon the plains, said: "He was a plainsman in every sense of the word,
+yet unlike any other <!-- Page 186 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>of his class. Whether on foot or on horseback, he
+was one of the most perfect types of physical manhood I ever saw. His
+manner was entirely free from all bluster and bravado. He never spoke of
+himself unless requested to do so. His influence among the frontiersmen
+was unbounded; his word was law. Wild Bill was anything but a
+quarrelsome man, yet none but himself could enumerate the many conflicts
+in which he had been engaged."</p>
+
+<p>These are the words of one fighting man about another, and both men are
+entitled to good rank in the annals of the West. The praise of an army
+general for a man of no rank or wealth leaves us feeling that, after
+all, it was a possible thing for a bad man to be a good man, and worthy
+of respect and admiration, utterly unmingled with maudlin sentiment or
+weak love for the melodramatic.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page 187 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Chapter_XIII" id="Chapter_XIII"></a>Chapter XIII</h2>
+
+<p>Frontier Wars&mdash;<i>Armed Conflicts of Bodies of Men on the
+Frontiers</i>&mdash;<i>Political Wars; Town Site Wars; Cattle Wars</i>&mdash;<i>Factional
+Fights</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p>The history of the border wars on the American frontier, where the
+fighting was more like battle than murder, and where the extent of the
+crimes against law became too large for the law ever to undertake any
+settlement, would make a long series of bloody volumes. These wars of
+the frontier were sometimes political, as the Kansas anti-slavery
+warfare; or, again, they were fights over town sites, one armed band
+against another, and both against the law. Wars over cows, as of the
+cattle men against the rustlers and "little fellows," often took on the
+phase of large armed bodies of men meeting in bloody encounter; though
+the bloodiest of these wars are those least known, and the <i>opera
+bouffe</i> wars those most widely advertised.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 188 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span></p><p>The state of Kansas, now so calm and peaceful, is difficult to picture
+as the scene of a general bloodshed; yet wherever you scratch Kansas
+history you find a fight. No territory of equal size has had so much war
+over so many different causes. Her story in Indian fighting, gambler
+fighting, outlaw fighting, town site fighting, and political fighting is
+one not approached by any other portion of the West; and if at times it
+was marked with fanaticism or with sordidness, it was none the less
+bitter and notable.</p>
+
+<p>The border wars of Kansas and Missouri at the time immediately preceding
+the civil war would be famed in song and story, had not the greater
+conflict between North and South wiped all that out of memory. Even the
+North was divided over the great question of the repeal of the Missouri
+Compromise. Alabama, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia,
+Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New
+Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and
+Virginia gave a whole or a majority vote for this repeal of the
+Compromise. Against the repeal were Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts,
+New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, <!-- Page 189 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin.
+Illinois and New Jersey voted a tie vote. Ohio cast four votes for the
+repeal measure, seventeen against it.</p>
+
+<p>This vote brought the territories of Kansas and Nebraska into the Union
+with the option open on whether or not they should have slavery: "it
+being the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate slavery
+into any territory, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people
+thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their own domestic
+institutions in their own way."</p>
+
+<p>That was very well; but who were "the people" of these debated grounds?
+Hundreds of abolitionists of the North thought it their duty to flock to
+Kansas and take up arms. Hundreds of the inhabitants of Missouri thought
+it incumbent upon them to run across the line and vote in Kansas on the
+"domestic institutions"; and to shoot in Kansas and to burn and ravage
+in Kansas. They were met by the anti-slavery legions along the wide
+frontier, and brother slew brother for years, one series of more or less
+ignoble and dastardly outrages following another in big or little,
+murders and arson in big or little, until the whole country at last was
+<!-- Page 190 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>drawn into this matter of the domestic institutions of "bleeding
+Kansas." The animosities formed in those days were bitter and enduring
+ones, and the more prominent figures on both sides were men marked for
+later slaughter. The civil war and the slavery question were fought out
+all over the West for ten years, even twenty years after the war was
+over. Some large figures came up out of this internecine strife, and
+there were many deeds of courage and many romantic adventures; but on
+the whole, although the result of all this was for the best, and added
+another state to the list unalterably opposed to human slavery, the
+story in detail is not a pleasant one, and adds no great glory to either
+side. It is a chapter of American history which is very well let alone.</p>
+
+<p>When the railroads came across the Western plains, they brought a man
+who has been present on the American frontier ever since the
+revolutionary war,&mdash;the land boomer. He was in Kentucky in time to rob
+poor old Daniel Boone of all the lands he thought he owned. He founded
+Marietta, on the Ohio river, on a land steal; and thence, westward, laid
+out one town after another. The early settler who came down the Ohio
+valley in the first and second <!-- Page 191 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>decades of the past century passed the
+ruins of abandoned towns far back to the east even in that day. The
+town-site shark passed across the Mississippi river and the Missouri,
+and everywhere his record was the same. He was the pioneer of avarice in
+very many cases, and often he inaugurated strife where he purported to
+be establishing law. Each town thought itself the garden spot and center
+of the universe&mdash;one knows not how many Kansas towns, for instance,
+contended over the absurd honor of being exactly at the center of the
+United States!&mdash;and local pride was such that each citizen must unite
+with others even in arms, if need be, to uphold the merits of his own
+"city."</p>
+
+<p>This peculiar phase of frontier nature usually came most into evidence
+over the questions of county seats. Hardly a frontier county seat was
+ever established without a fight of some kind, and often a bloody one.
+It has chanced that the author has been in and around a few of these
+clashes between rival towns, and he may say that the vehemence of the
+antagonism of such encounters would have been humorous, had it not been
+so deadly. Two "cities," composed each of a few frame shanties and a set
+of <!-- Page 192 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>blue-print maps, one just as barren of delight as the other, and
+neither worth fighting over at the time, do not seem typical of any
+great moral purpose; yet at times their citizens fought as stubbornly as
+did the men who fought for and against slavery in Kansas. One instance
+of this sort of thing will do, and it is covered in the chapter
+describing the Stevens County War, one of the most desperate and bloody,
+as well as one of the most recent feuds of local politicians.</p>
+
+<p>For some reason, perhaps that of remoteness of time, the wars of the cow
+men of the range seem to have had a bolder, a less sordid and more
+romantic interest, if these terms be allowable. When the cow man began
+to fence up the free range, to shut up God's out-of-doors, he intrenched
+upon more than a local or a political pride. He was now infringing upon
+the great principle of personal freedom. He was throttling the West
+itself, which had always been a land of freedom. One does not know
+whether all one's readers have known it, that unspeakable feeling of
+freedom, of independence, of rebellion at restraint, which came when one
+could ride or drive for days across the empire of the plains and never
+meet a fence <!-- Page 193 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>to hinder, nor need a road to show the way. To meet one of
+these new far-flung fences of the rich men who began to take up the West
+was at that time only to cut it and ride on. The free men of the West
+would not be fenced in. The range was theirs, so they blindly and
+lovingly thought. Let those blame them who love this day more than that.</p>
+
+<p>But the fence was the sign of the property-owning man; and the
+property-owning man has always beaten the nomad and the restless man at
+last, and set metes and bounds for him to observe. The nesters and
+rustlers fought out the battle for the free range more fiercely than was
+ever generally known.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most widely known of these cow wars was the absurd Johnson
+County War, of Wyoming, which got much newspaper advertising at the
+time&mdash;the summer of 1892&mdash;and which was always referred to with a
+certain contempt among old-timers as the "dude war." Only two men were
+killed in this war, and the non-resident cattle men who undertook to be
+ultra-Western and do a little vigilante work for themselves among the
+rustlers found that they were not fit for the task. They were very glad
+indeed to get themselves arrested <!-- Page 194 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span>and under cover, more especially in
+the protection of the military. They found that they had not lost any
+rustlers when they stirred up a whole valley full and were themselves
+besieged, surrounded, and well-nigh ready for a general wiping out. They
+killed a couple of "little fellows," or, rather, some of their hired
+Texas cowboys did it for them, but that was all they accomplished,
+except well-nigh to bankrupt Wyoming in the legal muddle, out of which,
+of course, nothing came. There were in this party of cattle men a member
+of the legislature, a member of the stock commission, some two dozen
+wealthy cattle men, two Harvard graduates, and a young Englishman in
+search of adventure. They made, on the whole, about the most
+contemptible and inefficient band of vigilantes that ever went out to
+regulate things, although their deeds were reported by wire to many
+journals, and for a time perhaps they felt that they were cutting quite
+a figure. They had very large property losses to incite them to their
+action, for the rustlers were then pretty much running things in that
+part of Wyoming, and the local courts would not convict them. This
+fiasco scarcely hastened the advent of the day&mdash;which came soon enough
+after the railroads and <!-- Page 195 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>the farmers&mdash;under which the home dweller
+outweighed the nomad.<a name="FNanchor_G_7" id="FNanchor_G_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_G_7" class="fnanchor">[G]</a></p>
+
+<p>Wars between sheep men and cattle men sometimes took on the phase of
+armed bodies of men meeting in bloody encounter. The sheep were always
+unwelcome on the range, and are so to-day, although the courts now
+adjust such matters better than they formerly did. The cow baron and his
+men often took revenge upon the woolly nuisances themselves and killed
+them in numbers. The author knows of one instance where five thousand
+sheep were killed in one box ca&ntilde;on by irate cow men whose range had been
+invaded. The sheep eat the grass down to the point of killing it, and
+cattle will not feed on a country which sheep have crossed. Many wars of
+this kind have been known all the way from Montana to Mexico.</p>
+
+<p>Again, factional fights might arise over some trivial matter as an
+immediate cause, in a community or a region where numbers of men fairly
+equal were separated in self-interest. In a day when life was still wild
+and free, and when the law was still unknown, these differences of
+opinion sometimes led to bitter and bloody conflicts between factions.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page 196 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Chapter_XIV" id="Chapter_XIV"></a>Chapter XIV</h2>
+
+<p>The Lincoln County War&mdash;<i>The Bloodiest, Most Dramatic and Most Romantic
+of all the Border Wars</i>&mdash;<i>First Authentic Story Ever Printed of the
+Bitterest Feud of the Southwest</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p>The entire history of the American frontier is one of rebellion against
+the law, if, indeed, that may be called rebellion whose apostles have
+not yet recognized any authority of the law. The frontier antedated
+anarchy. It broke no social compact, for it had never made one. Its
+population asked no protection save that afforded under the stern
+suzerainty of the six-shooter. The anarchy of the frontier, if we may
+call it such, was sometimes little more than self-interest against
+self-interest. This was the true description of the border conflict now
+in question.</p>
+
+<p>The Lincoln County War, fully speaking, embraced three wars; the Pecos
+War of the early '70's, the Harold War of 1874, and the <!-- Page 197 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>Lincoln County
+War proper, which may be said to have begun in 1874 and to have ended in
+1879. The actors in these different conflicts were all intermingled.
+There was no blood feud at the bottom of this fighting. It was the war
+of self-interest against self-interest, each side supported by numbers
+of fighting men.</p>
+
+<p>At that time Lincoln County, New Mexico, was about as large as the state
+of Pennsylvania. For judicial purposes it was annexed to Donna A&ntilde;a
+County, and its territories included both the present counties of Eddy
+and Chaves, and part of what is now Donna A&ntilde;a. It extended west
+practically as far the Rio Grande river, and embraced a tract of
+mountains and high tableland nearly two hundred miles square. Out of
+this mountain chain, to the east and southeast, ran two beautiful
+mountain streams, the Bonito and the Ruidoso, flowing into the Hondo,
+which continues on to the flat valley of the Pecos river&mdash;once the
+natural pathway of the Texas cattle herds bound north to Utah and the
+mountain territories, and hence the natural pathway also for many lawful
+or lawless citizens from Texas.</p>
+
+<p>At the close of the civil war, Texas was full of unbranded and unowned
+cattle. Out of the <!-- Page 198 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span>town of Paris, Texas, which was founded by his
+father, came one John Chisum&mdash;one of the most typical cow men that ever
+lived. Bold, fearless, shrewd, unscrupulous, genial, magnetic, he was
+the man of all others to occupy a kingdom which had heretofore had no
+ruler.</p>
+
+<p>John Chisum drove the first herds up the Pecos trail to the territorial
+market. He held at one time perhaps eighty thousand head of cattle under
+his brand of the "Long I" and "jinglebob." Moreover, he had powers of
+attorney from a great many cow men in Texas and lower New Mexico,
+authorizing him to take up any trail cattle which he found under their
+respective brands. He carried a tin cylinder, large as a water-spout,
+that contained, some said, more than a thousand of these powers of
+attorney. At least, it is certain he had papers enough to give him a
+wide authority. Chisum riders combed every north-bound herd. If they
+found the cattle of any of his "friends," they were cut out and turned
+on the Chisum range. There were many "little fellows," small cattlemen,
+nested here and there on the flanks of the Chisum herds. What more
+natural than that they should steal from him, in case they found a
+market of their own? That was <!-- Page 199 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>much easier than raising cows of their
+own. Now, there was a market up this winding Bonito valley, at Lincoln
+and Fort Stanton. The soldiers of the latter post, and the Indians of
+the Mescalero reservation near by, needed supplies. There were others
+besides John Chisum who might need a beef contract now and then, and
+cattle to fill it.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 278px;"><a name="i223">
+<img src="images/i223.jpg" class="jpg" width="278" height="400" alt="JOHN SIMPSON CHISUM
+A famous cattle king, died December 23, 1884" title="" />
+<span class="caption">JOHN SIMPSON CHISUM</span></a></div>
+<p class="center">A famous cattle king, died December 23, 1884</p>
+
+
+<p>At the end of the civil war, there was in New Mexico, with what was
+known as the California Column, which joined the forces of New Mexican
+volunteers, an officer known as Major L. G. Murphy. After the war, a
+great many men settled near the points where they were mustered out in
+the South and West. It was thus with Major Murphy, who located as
+post-trader at the little frontier post known as Fort Stanton, which was
+founded by Captain Frank Stanton in 1854, in the Indian days. John
+Chisum located his Bosque Grande ranch about 1865, and Murphy came to
+Fort Stanton about 1866. In 1875, Chisum dropped down to his South
+Spring River ranch, and by that time Murphy had been thrown out of the
+post-tradership by Major Clendenning, commanding officer, who did not
+like his methods. He had dropped nine miles down the Bonito from <!-- Page 200 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>Fort
+Stanton, with two young associates, under the firm name of Murphy, Riley
+&amp; Dolan, sometimes spoken of as L. G. Murphy &amp; Co.</p>
+
+<p>Murphy was a hard-drinking man, yet withal something of a student. He
+was intelligent, generous, bold and shrewd. He "staked" every little cow
+man in Lincoln county, including a great many who hung on the flanks of
+John Chisum's herds. These men in turn were in their ethics bound to
+support him and his methods. Murphy was king of the Bonito country.
+Chisum was king of the Pecos; not merchant but cow man, and caring for
+nothing which had not grass and water on it.</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, were two rival kings. Each at times had occasion for a beef
+contract. The result is obvious to anyone who knows the ways of the
+remoter West in earlier days. The times were ripe for trouble. Murphy
+bought stolen beef, and furnished bran instead of flour on his Indian
+contracts, as the government records show. His henchmen held the Chisum
+herds as their legitimate prey. Thus we now have our stage set and
+peopled for the grim drama of a bitter border war.</p>
+
+<p>The Pecos war was mostly an indiscriminate killing among cow men and
+cattle thieves, and <!-- Page 201 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>it cost many lives, though it had no beginning and
+no end. The Texas men, hard riders and cheerful shooters for the most
+part, came pushing up the Pecos and into the Bonito ca&ntilde;on. Among these,
+in 1874, were four brothers known as the Harold boys, Bill, Jack, Tom
+and Bob, who had come from Texas in 1872. Two of them located ranches on
+the Ruidoso, being "staked" therein by Major Murphy, king for that part
+of the countryside. The Harold boys once undertook to run the town of
+Lincoln, and a foolish justice ordered a constable to arrest them. One
+Gillam, an ex-sheriff, told the boys to put on their guns. On that night
+there were killed Gillam, Bill Harold, Dave Warner and Martinez, the
+Mexican constable. The dead body of Martinez was lying in the street the
+next morning with a deep cross cut on the forehead. From that time on
+for the next five years, it was no uncommon thing to see dead men lying
+in the streets of Lincoln. The Harold boys had sworn revenge.</p>
+
+<p>There was a little dance in an adobe one night at Lincoln, when Ben
+Harold and some Texas men from the Seven Rivers country rode up. They
+killed four men and one woman that night before they started back to
+Seven Rivers. <!-- Page 202 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>From that time on, it was Texas against the law, such as
+the latter was. No resident places the number of the victims of the
+Harold war at less than forty or fifty, and it is believed that at least
+seventy-five would be more correct. These killings proved the weakness
+of the law, for none of the Harold gang was ever punished. As for the
+Lincoln County War proper, the magazine was now handsomely laid. Only
+the spark was needed. What would that naturally be? Either an actual law
+court, or else&mdash;a woman! In due time, both were forthcoming.</p>
+
+<p>The woman in the case still lives to-day in New Mexico, sometimes spoken
+of as the "Cattle Queen" of New Mexico. She bears now the name of Mrs.
+Susan E. Barber. Her maiden name was Susan E. Hummer, the name sometimes
+spelled Homer, and she was born in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Susan
+Hummer was a granddaughter of Anna Maria Spangler-Stauffer. The Spangler
+family is a noble one of Germany and very old. George Spangler was
+cup-bearer to Godfrey, Chancellor of Frederick Barbarossa, and was with
+the latter on the Crusade when Barbarossa was drowned in the Syrian
+river, Calycadmus, in 1190. The <!-- Page 203 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>American seat of this old family was in
+York county, Pennsylvania, where the first Spanglers settled in 1731. It
+was from this tenacious and courageous ancestry that there sprang this
+figure of a border warfare in a region wild as Barbarossa's realm
+centuries ago.</p>
+
+<p>On August 23, 1873, in Atchison, Kansas, Susan Hummer was married to
+Alexander A. McSween, a young lawyer fresh from the Washington
+university law school of St. Louis. McSween was born in Charlottetown,
+Prince Edward Island, and was educated in the first place as a
+Presbyterian minister. He was a man of good appearance, of intelligence
+and address, and of rather more polish than the average man. He was an
+orator, a dreamer, and a visionary; a strange, complex character. He was
+not a fighting man, and belonged anywhere in the world rather than on
+the frontier of the bloody Southwest. His health was not good, and he
+resolved to journey to New Mexico. He and his young bride started
+overland, with a good team and conveyance, and reached the little
+<i>placita</i> of Lincoln, in the Bonito ca&ntilde;on, March 15, 1875. Outside of
+the firm of Murphy, Riley &amp; Dolan, there were at that time but one or
+two other American <!-- Page 204 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>families. McSween started up in the practice of law.</p>
+
+<p>There appeared in northern New Mexico at about this time an Englishman
+by the name of J. H. Tunstall, newly arrived in the West in search of
+investment. Tunstall was told that there was good open cattle range to
+be had in Lincoln county. He came to Lincoln, met McSween, formed a
+partnership with him in the banking and mercantile business, and,
+moreover, started for himself, and altogether independently, a horse and
+cattle ranch on the Rio Feliz, a day's journey below Lincoln. Now, King
+Murphy, of Lincoln county, found a rival business growing up directly
+under his eyes. He liked this no better than King Chisum liked the
+little cow men on his flanks in the Seven Rivers country. Things were
+ripening still more rapidly for trouble. Presently, the immediate cause
+made its appearance.</p>
+
+<p>There had been a former partner and friend of Major Murphy in the
+post-tradership at Fort Stanton, Colonel Emil Fritz, who established the
+Fritz ranch, a few miles below Lincoln. Colonel Fritz having amassed a
+considerable fortune, concluded to return to Germany. He had insured his
+life in the American Insurance <!-- Page 205 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>Company for ten thousand dollars, and
+had made a will leaving this policy, or the greater part of it, to his
+sister. The latter had married a clerk at Fort Stanton by the name of
+Scholland, but did not get along well with her husband. Heretofore no
+such thing as divorce had been known in that part of the world; but
+courts and lawyers were now present, and it occurred to Mrs. Scholland
+to have a divorce. She sent to Mr. McSween for legal counsel, and for a
+time lived in the McSween house.</p>
+
+<p>Now came news of the death, in Germany, of Colonel Emil Fritz. His
+brother, Charlie Fritz, undertook to look up the estate. He found the
+will and insurance policy had been left with Major Murphy; but Major
+Murphy, accustomed to running affairs in his own way, refused to give up
+the Emil Fritz will, and forced McSween to get a court order appointing
+Mrs. Scholland administratrix of the Fritz estate. Not even in that
+capacity would Major Murphy deliver to her the will and insurance policy
+when they were demanded, and it is claimed that he destroyed the will.
+Certainly it was never probated. Murphy was accustomed to keep this will
+in a tin can, hid in a hole in the adobe wall of his store building.
+There <!-- Page 206 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span>were no safes at that time and place. The policy had been left as
+security for a loan of nine hundred dollars advanced by a firm known as
+Spiegelberg Brothers. Few ingredients were now lacking for a typical
+melodrama. Meantime the plot thickened by the failure of the insurance
+company!</p>
+
+<p>McSween, in the interest of Mrs. Scholland, now went East to see what
+could be done in the collection of the insurance policy. He was able
+finally, in 1876, to collect the full amount of ten thousand dollars,
+and this he deposited in his own name in a St. Louis bank then owned by
+Colonel Hunter. He had been obliged to pay the Spiegelbergs the face of
+their loan before he could get the policy to take East with him. He
+wished to be secured against this advancement and reimbursed as well for
+his expenses, which, together with his fee, amounted to a considerable
+sum. Moreover, the German Minister enjoined McSween from turning over
+any of this money, as there were other heirs in Germany. Major Murphy
+owed McSween some money. Colonel Fritz also died owing McSween
+thirty-three hundred dollars, fees due on legal work. Yet Murphy
+demanded the full amount of the insurance policy from McSween <!-- Page 207 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>again and
+again. Murphy, Riley &amp; Dolan now sued out an attachment on McSween's
+property, and levied on the goods in the Tunstall-McSween store. The
+"law" was now doing its work; but there was a very liberal
+interpretation put upon the law's intent. As construed by Sheriff
+William Brady, the writ applied also to the Englishman Tunstall's
+property in cattle and horses on the Rio Feliz ranch; which, of course,
+was high-handed illegality. McSween's statement that he had no interest
+in the Feliz ranch served no purpose. Brady and Murphy were warm
+friends. The lawyer McSween had accused them of being something more
+than that&mdash;allies and conspirators. McSween and Tunstall bought Lincoln
+county scrip cheap; but when they presented it to the county treasurer,
+Murphy, it was not paid, and it was charged that he and Brady had made
+away with the county funds. That was never proved, for, as a matter of
+fact, no county books were ever kept! McSween started the first set ever
+known there.</p>
+
+<p>At this time there was working for Tunstall on the Feliz ranch the noted
+desperado, Billy the Kid, who a short time formerly had worked for John
+Chisum. The latter at this stage of <!-- Page 208 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>the advancing troubles, appears
+rather as a third party, or as holding one point of a triangle, whose
+other two corners were occupied by the Murphy and McSween factions.</p>
+
+<p>Whether or not it was a legal posse which went out to serve the
+attachment on the Tunstall cattle&mdash;or whether or not a posse was
+necessary for that purpose&mdash;the truth is that a band of men, on February
+13th, 1878, did go out under some semblance of the law and in the
+interests of the Murphy people's claim. Some state that William S.
+Morton, or "Billy" Morton, was chosen by Sheriff Brady as his deputy and
+as leader of this posse. Others name different men as leaders.
+Certainly, the band was suited for any desperate occasion. With it was
+one Tom Hill, who had killed several men at different times, and who had
+been heard to say that he intended to kill Tunstall. There was also
+Jesse Evans, just in from the Rio Grande country, and, unless that were
+Billy the Kid, the most redoubtable fighter in all that country. Evans
+had formerly worked for John Chisum, and had been the friend of Billy
+the Kid; but these two had now become enemies. Others of the party were
+William M. Johnson, Ham Mills, Johnnie Hurley, Frank Baker, several
+<!-- Page 209 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>ranchers still living in that country, and two or three Mexicans. All
+these rode across the mountains to the Ruidoso valley on their way to
+the Rio Feliz. They met, coming from the Tunstall ranch, Tunstall
+himself in company with his foreman, Dick Brewer, John Middleton and
+Billy the Kid. When the Murphy posse came up with Tunstall, he was
+alone. His men were at the time chasing a flock of wild turkeys along a
+distant hillside. When called upon to halt, Tunstall did so, and then
+came up toward the posse. "You wouldn't hurt me, boys, would you?" he
+said, as he approached leading his horse. When within a few yards, Tom
+Hill said to him, "Why, hello, Tunstall, is that you?" and almost with
+the words fired upon him with his six-shooter and shot him down. Some
+say that Hill shot Tunstall again, and a young Mexican boy called
+Pantilon beat in his skull with a rock. They put Tunstall's hat under
+his head and left him lying there beside his horse, which was also
+killed. His folded coat was found under the horse's head. His body,
+lashed on a burro's back, was brought over the mountains by his friends
+that night into Lincoln, twenty miles distant. Fifty men took up the
+McSween fight that night; for, in truth, the killing <!-- Page 210 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span>of Tunstall was
+murder and without justification.</p>
+
+<p>That was the beginning of the actual Lincoln County War. Dick Brewer,
+Tunstall's foreman, was now leader of the McSween fighting men. McSween,
+of course, supplied him with color of "legal" authority. He was
+appointed "special constable." Neither party had difficulty in obtaining
+all the legal papers required. Each party was presently to have a
+sheriff of its own. Meantime, there was at Lincoln an accommodating
+justice of the peace, John P. Wilson, who was ready to give either
+faction any sort of legal paper it demanded. Dick Brewer, Billy the Kid,
+and nearly a dozen others of the first McSween posse started to the
+lower country, where lived a good many of Murphy's friends, small cow
+men and others. On the Rio Pe&ntilde;asco, about six miles from the Pecos, they
+came across a party of five men, two of whom, Billy Morton and Frank
+Baker, had been present at the killing of Tunstall. Baker and Morton
+surrendered under promise of safekeeping, and were held for a time at
+Roswell. On the trail from Roswell to Lincoln, at a point near the Agua
+Negra, both these men, while kneeling and pleading for their lives, were
+deliberately <!-- Page 211 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>shot and killed by Billy the Kid. There was with the
+Brewer posse a buffalo-hunter by the name of McClosky, who had promised
+to take care of these prisoners. Joe McNab, of the posse, shot and
+killed McClosky in cold blood. In this McSween posse were "Doc"
+Skurlock, Charlie Bowdre, Billy the Kid, Hendry Brown, Jim French, John
+Middleton, with McNab, Wait and Smith, besides McClosky, who seems not
+to have been loyal enough to them to sanction cold blooded murder. These
+victims were killed March 7th, 1878.</p>
+
+<p>There had now been deliberate murder committed upon the one side and
+upon the other. There were many men implicated on each side. These men,
+in self-interest, now drew apart together. The factions, of necessity,
+became more firmly established. It may be seen that there was very
+little principle at stake on either side. The country was now simply
+going wild again. It meant to take the law into its own hands; and the
+population was divided into these two factions, to one or the other of
+which every resident must perforce belong. A choice, and sometimes a
+quick one, was an imperative necessity.</p>
+
+<p>The next killing was that of Buckshot Roberts, <!-- Page 212 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span>at Blazer's Mill, near
+the Mescalero Reservation buildings, an affair described in a later
+chapter. Thirteen men, later of the Kid's gang, led by Dick Brewer,
+attacked Roberts, who killed Dick Brewer before he himself died. The
+death of the latter left the Kid chief of the McSween forces.</p>
+
+<p>A great blood lust now possessed all the population. It wanted no law.
+There is no doubt about the intention to make away with Judge Warren
+Bristol of the circuit court. The latter, knowing of these turbulent
+times in Lincoln, decided not to hold court. He sent word to Sheriff
+William Brady to open court and then at once to adjourn it. This was on
+April 1, 1878.</p>
+
+<p>Sheriff Brady, in walking down the street toward the dwelling-house in
+which court sessions were then held, was obliged to pass the McSween
+store and residence. Behind the corral wall, there lay ambushed Billy
+the Kid and at least five others of his gang. Brady was accompanied by
+Billy Matthews (J. B. Matthews, now dead; postmaster of Roswell, New
+Mexico, in 1904), by George Hindman, his deputy, and Dad Peppin, later
+sheriff of Lincoln county. The Kid and his men waited until <!-- Page 213 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span>the victims
+had gone by. Then a volley was fired. Sheriff Brady, shot in the back,
+slowly sank down, his knees weakening under him. "My God! My God! My
+God!" he exclaimed, as he gradually dropped. He had been struck in the
+back by five balls. As he sank down, he turned his head to see his
+murderers, and as he did so received a ball in the eye, and so fell
+dead. George Hindman, the deputy, also shot in the back, ran down the
+street about one hundred and fifty yards before he fell. He lay in the
+street and few dared to go out to him. A saloon-keeper, Ike Stockton
+(himself a bad man, and later killed at Durango, Colorado), offered him
+a drink of water, which he brought in his hat, and Hindman, accepting
+it, fell back dead.</p>
+
+<p>The murder of Sheriff Brady left the country without even the semblance
+of law; but each party now took steps to set up a legal machinery of its
+own, as cover for its own acts. The old justice of the peace, John P.
+Wilson, would issue a warrant on any pretext for any person; but there
+must be some one with authority to serve the process. In a
+quasi-election, the McSween faction instituted John Copeland as their
+sheriff. The Murphy faction held that Copeland <!-- Page 214 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>never qualified as
+sheriff. He lived with McSween part of the time. It was understood that
+he was sheriff for the purpose of bothering nobody but the Murphy
+people.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime, the other party were not thus to be surpassed. In June, 1878,
+Governor Axtell appointed George W. Peppin as sheriff of Lincoln county.
+Peppin qualified at Mesilla, came back to Lincoln, and demanded of
+Copeland the warrants in his possession. He had, on his part, twelve
+warrants for the arrest of members of the McSween gang. Little lacked
+now to add confusion in this bloody coil. The country was split into two
+factions. Each had a sheriff as a figurehead! What and where was the
+law?</p>
+
+<p>Peppin had to get fighting men to serve his warrants, and he could not
+always be particular about the social standing of his posses. He had a
+thankless and dangerous position as the "Murphy sheriff." Most of his
+posses were recruited from among the small ranchers and cow boys of the
+lower Pecos. Peppin was sheriff only a few months, and threw up the job
+$2,800 in debt.</p>
+
+<p>The men of both parties were now scouting about for each other here and
+there over a district more than a hundred miles square; but <!-- Page 215 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span>presently
+the war was to take on the dignity of a pitched battle. Early in July,
+1878, the Kid and his gang rounded up at the McSween house. There were a
+dozen white desperadoes in their party. There were about forty Mexicans
+also identified with the McSween faction. These were quartered in the
+Montana and Ellis residences, well down the street.</p>
+
+<p>The Murphy forces now surrounded the McSween house, and at once a
+pitched battle began. The McSween men started the firing from the
+windows and loopholes of their fortress. The Peppin men replied. The
+town, divided against itself, held under cover. For three days the two
+little armies lay here, separated by the distance of the street, perhaps
+sixty men in all on the McSween side, perhaps thirty or forty in all on
+the Murphy-Peppin side, of whom nineteen were Americans.</p>
+
+<p>To keep the McSween men inside their fortifications, Peppin had three
+men posted on the mountain side, whence they could look down directly
+upon the top of the houses, as the mountain here rises up sharply back
+of the narrow line of adobe buildings. These pickets were Charlie
+Crawford, Lucillo Montoye, and another Mexican, and with their
+long-range buffalo <!-- Page 216 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span>guns they threw a good many heavy slugs of lead into
+the McSween house. At last, one Fernando Herrera, a McSween Mexican,
+standing in the back door of the Montana house, fired, at a distance of
+about nine hundred yards, at Charlie Crawford. The shot cut Crawford
+down, and he lay, with his back broken, behind a rock on the mountain
+side in the hot sun nearly all day. Crawford was later brought down to
+the street. Medical attendance there was none, and few dared to offer
+sympathy, but Captain Saturnino Baca<a name="FNanchor_H_8" id="FNanchor_H_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_H_8" class="fnanchor">[H]</a> carried Crawford a drink of
+water.</p>
+
+<p>The death of Crawford ended the second day's fighting. Peppin's party
+now numbered sixteen men from the Seven Rivers country, or <!-- Page 217 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>twenty-eight
+in all. The McSween men besieged in the adobe were Billy the Kid, Harvey
+Norris (killed), Tom O'Folliard, Ighenio Salazar (wounded and left for
+dead), Ignacio Gonzales, Jos&eacute; Semora (killed), Francisco Romero
+(killed), and Alexander A. McSween, leader of the faction (killed). Doc
+Skurlock, Jack Middleton, and Charlie Bowdre were in the adjoining store
+building.</p>
+
+<p>At about noon of the third day, old Andy Boyle, ex-soldier of the
+British army, said, "We'll have to get a cannon and blow in the doors.
+I'll go up to the fort and steal a cannon." Half-way up to the fort, he
+found his cannon&mdash;two Gatling guns and a troop of colored
+cavalry&mdash;already on the road to stop what had been reported as firing on
+women and children. The detachment was under charge of the commanding
+officer of Fort Stanton, Colonel Dudley, who marched his men past the
+beleaguered house and drew them up below the place. Colonel Dudley was
+besought by Mrs. McSween, who came out under fire, to save her husband's
+life; but he refused to interfere or take side in the matter, saying
+that the sheriff of the county was there and in charge of his own posse.
+Mrs. McSween refused to accept <!-- Page 218 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span>protection and go up to the post, but
+returned to her husband for what she knew must soon be the end.</p>
+
+<p>McSween, ex-minister, lawyer, honest or dishonest instigator, innocent
+or malicious cause&mdash;and one may choose his adjectives in this matter&mdash;of
+all these bloody scenes, now sat in the house, his head bowed in his
+hands, the picture of foreboding despair. His nerve was absolutely gone.
+No one paid any attention to him. His wife, the actual leader, was far
+braver than he. The Kid was the commander. "They'd kill us all if we
+surrendered," he said. "We'll shoot it out!"</p>
+
+<p>Old Andy Boyle got some sticks and some coal oil, and, under protection
+of rifles, started a fire against a street door of the house. Jack Long
+and two others also fired the house in the rear. A keg of powder had
+been concealed under the floor. The flames reached this powder, and
+there was an explosion which did more than anything else toward ending
+the siege.</p>
+
+<p>At about dusk, Bob Beckwith, old man Pierce, and one other man, ran
+around toward the rear of the house. Beckwith called out to the inmates
+to surrender. They demanded that the sheriff come for a parley. "I'm a
+deputy <!-- Page 219 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>sheriff," replied Beckwith. It was dark or nearly so. Several
+figures burst out of the rear door of the burning house, among these the
+unfortunate McSween. Around him, and ahead of him, ran Billy the Kid,
+Skurlock, French, O'Folliard, Bowdre, and a few others. The flashing of
+six-shooters at close range ended the three days' battle. McSween, still
+unarmed, dropped dead. He was found, half sitting, leaning against the
+corral wall. Bob Beckwith, of the Peppin forces, fell almost at the same
+time, killed by Billy the Kid. Near McSween's body lay those of Romero
+and Semora and of Harvey Norris. The latter was a young Kansan, newly
+arrived in that country, of whom little was known.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"><a name="i245">
+<img src="images/i245.jpg" class="jpg" width="600" height="371" alt="1. IGHENIO SALAZAR 2. ALEX. A. McSWEEN 3. CAPT. S. BACA
+(1) Shot and left for dead, in the Lincoln County War. (2) Leader of a
+faction in the Lincoln County War. (3) Friend of Kit Carson; the man who
+carried the news of the big street fight to Ft. Stanton" title="" />
+<span class="caption">(1) Shot and left for dead, in the Lincoln County War. (2) Leader of a
+faction in the Lincoln County War. (3) Friend of Kit Carson; the man who
+carried the news of the big street fight to Ft. Stanton</span>
+</a></div>
+
+<p>With the McSween party, there was one game Mexican, Ighenio Salazar, who
+is alive to-day, by miracle. In the rush from the house, Salazar was
+shot down, being struck by two bullets. He feigned death. Old Andy Boyle
+stood over him with his gun cocked. "I guess he's dead," said Andy. "If
+I thought he wasn't, I shoot him some more." They then jumped on
+Salazar's body to assure themselves. In the darkness, Salazar rolled
+over into a ditch, later made his escape, stopped his wounds with <!-- Page 220 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span>some
+corn husks, and found concealment in a Mexican house until he
+subsequently recovered.</p>
+
+<p>This fight cost McSween his life just at the point when he thought he
+had attained success. Four days before he was killed, he had word from
+the United States Government's commissioner, Angell, that the President
+had deposed Governor Axtell of New Mexico, on account of his appointment
+of Dad Peppin as sheriff, and on charges that Axtell was favoring the
+Murphy faction. General Lew Wallace was now sent out as Governor of New
+Mexico, invested with "extraordinary powers." He needed them. President
+Hayes had issued governmental proclamation calling upon these desperate
+fighting men to lay down their arms, but it was not certain they would
+easily be persuaded. It was a long way to Washington, and a short way to
+a six-shooter.</p>
+
+<p>General Wallace assured Mrs. McSween of protection, but he found there
+was no such thing as getting to the bottom of the Lincoln County War. It
+would have been necessary to hang the entire population of the county to
+execute a formal justice. Almost none of the indictments "stuck," and
+one by one the cases <!-- Page 221 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>were dismissed. The thing was too big for the law.</p>
+
+<p>The only man ever actually indicted and brought to trial for a killing
+during the Lincoln County War was Billy the Kid, and there is many a
+resident of Lincoln to-day who declares that the Kid was made a
+scapegoat; and many a man even to-day charges Governor Wallace with bad
+faith. Governor Wallace met the Kid by appointment at the Ellis House in
+Lincoln. The Kid came in fully armed, and the old soldier was surprised
+to see in him a bright-faced and pleasant-talking boy. In the presence
+of two witnesses now living, Governor Wallace asked the Kid to come in
+and lay down his arms, and promised to pardon him if he would stand his
+trial and if he should be convicted in the courts. The Kid declined.
+"There is no justice for me in the courts of this country now," said he.
+"I've gone too far." And so he went back with his little gang of
+outlaws, to meet a dramatic end, after further incidents in a singular
+and blood-stained career.</p>
+
+<p>The Lincoln County War now spread wider than even the boundaries of the
+United States. A United States deputy, Wiederman, had been employed by
+the father of the murdered J. H. <!-- Page 222 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>Tunstall to take care of the Tunstall
+estates and to secure some kind of British revenge for his murder.
+Wiederman falsely persuaded Tunstall <i>p&egrave;re</i> that he had helped kill
+Frank Baker and Billy Morton, and Tunstall <i>p&egrave;re</i> made him rich,
+Wiederman going to England, where it was safer. The British legation
+took up the matter of Tunstall's death, and the slow-moving governmental
+wheels at Washington began to revolve. A United States indemnity was
+paid for Tunstall's life.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. McSween, meantime, kept up her work in the local courts. Some time
+after her husband's death, she employed a lawyer by the name of Chapman,
+of Las Vegas, a one-armed man, to undertake the dangerous task of aiding
+her in her work of revenge. By this time, most of the fighters were
+disposed to lay down their arms. The whole society of the country had
+been ruined by the war. Murphy &amp; Co. had long ago mortgaged everything
+they had, and a good many things which they did not have, <i>e. g.</i>, some
+of John Chisum's cattle, to Tom Catron, of Sante F&eacute;. A big peace talk
+was made in the town, and it was agreed that, as there was no longer any
+advantage of a financial nature in keeping up the war, all parties
+<!-- Page 223 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>concerned might as well quit organized fighting, and engage in
+individual pillage instead. Murphy &amp; Co. were ruined. Murphy and McSween
+were both dead. Chisum could be depended upon to pay some of the debts
+to the warriors through stolen cattle, if not through signed checks.
+Why, then, should good, game men go on killing each other for nothing?
+This was the argument used.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"><a name="i251">
+<img src="images/i251.jpg" class="jpg" width="600" height="369" alt="1. MRS. SATURNINO BACA (In early life) 2. MRS. SUSAN E.
+BARBER 3. MRS. SATURNINO BACA (At sixty)
+The &quot;women in the case&quot; in the Lincoln County War Mrs. Susan E. Barber
+was known as the &quot;Cattle Queen of the West&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption">The &quot;women in the case&quot; in the Lincoln County War. Mrs. Susan E. Barber
+was known as the &quot;Cattle Queen of the West&quot;</span></a>
+</div>
+
+<p>In this conference there were, on the Murphy side, Jesse Evans, Jimmie
+Dolan and Bill Campbell. On the other side were Billy the Kid, Tom
+O'Folliard and the game Mexican, Salazar. Each of these men had a .45
+Colt at his belt, and a cocked Winchester in his hand. At last, however,
+the six men shook hands. They agreed to end the war. Then, frontier
+fashion, they set off for the nearest saloon.</p>
+
+<p>The Las Vegas lawyer, Chapman, happened to cross the street as these
+desperate fighting men, used to killing, now well drunken, came out, all
+armed, and all swearing friendship.</p>
+
+<p>"Halt, you, there!" cried Bill Campbell to Chapman; and the latter
+paused. "Damn you," said Campbell to Chapman; "you are the &mdash;&mdash; &mdash;&mdash; of
+a &mdash;&mdash; that has come down here to stir up trouble among us fellows.
+We're <!-- Page 224 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>peaceful. It's all settled, and we're friends now. Now, damn you,
+just to show you're peaceable too, you dance."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm a gentleman," said Chapman, "and I'll dance for no ruffian." An
+instant later, shot through the heart by Campbell's six-shooter, as is
+alleged, he lay dead in the roadway. No one dared disturb his body. He
+was shot at such close range that some papers in his coat pocket took
+fire from the powder flash, and his body was partially consumed as it
+lay there in the road.</p>
+
+<p>For this killing, Jimmie Dolan, Billy Matthews and Bill Campbell were
+indicted and tried. Dolan and Matthews were acquitted. Campbell, in
+default of a better jail, was kept in the guard-house at Fort Stanton.
+One night he disappeared, in company with his guard and some United
+States cavalry horses. Since then nothing has been heard of him. His
+real name was not Campbell, but Ed Richardson.</p>
+
+<p>Billy the Kid did not kill John Chisum, though all the country wondered
+at that fact. There was a story that he forced Chisum to sign a bill of
+sale for eight hundred head of cattle. He claimed that Chisum owed money
+to the McSween fighting men, to whom he had <!-- Page 225 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span>promised salaries which
+were never paid; but no evidence exists that Chisum ever made such a
+promise, although he sometimes sent a wagonload of supplies to the
+McSween fighting men.</p>
+
+<p>John Chisum died of cancer at Eureka Springs, Missouri, December 26,
+1884, and his great holdings as a cattle king afterward became somewhat
+involved. He could once have sold out for $600,000, but later mortgaged
+his holdings for $250,000. He was concerned in a packing plant at Kansas
+City, a business into which he was drawn by others, and of which he knew
+nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Major Murphy died at Sante F&eacute; before the big fight at Lincoln. Jimmie
+Dolan died a few years later, and lies buried in the little graveyard
+near the Fritz ranch. Riley, the other member of the firm, went to
+Colorado, and was last heard of at Rocky Ford, where he was prosperous.
+The heritage of hatred was about all that McSween left to his widow, who
+presently married George L. Barber, at Lincoln, and later proved herself
+to be a good business woman&mdash;good enough to make a fortune in the cattle
+business from the four hundred head of cattle John Chisum gave her to
+settle a debt he had owed McSween. She afterward established <!-- Page 226 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span>a fine
+ranch near Three Rivers, New Mexico.</p>
+
+<p>Dad Peppin, known as the "Murphy sheriff" by the McSween faction, lived
+out his life on his little holding at the edge of Lincoln <i>placita</i>. He
+died in 1905. His rival, John Copeland, died in 1902. The street of
+Lincoln, one of the bloodiest of its size in the world, is silent.
+Another generation is growing up. William Brady, Major Brady's eldest
+son, and Jos&eacute;fina Brady-Chavez, a daughter, live in Lincoln; and Bob
+Brady, another son of the murdered sheriff, was long jailer at Lincoln
+jail. The law has arisen over the ruin wrought by lawlessness. It is a
+noteworthy fact that, although the law never punished the participants
+in this border conflict, the lawlessness was never ended by any
+vigilante movement. The fighting was so desperate and prolonged that it
+came to be held as warfare and not as murder. There is no doubt that,
+barring the border fighting of Kansas and Missouri, this was the
+greatest of American border wars.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page 227 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Chapter_XV" id="Chapter_XV"></a>Chapter XV</h2>
+
+<p>The Stevens County War&mdash;<i>The Bloodiest County Seat War of the
+West</i>&mdash;<i>The Personal Narrative of a Man Who Was Shot and Left for
+Dead</i>&mdash;<i>The Most Expensive United States Court Case Ever Tried</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p>In the month of May, 1886, the writer was one of a party of
+buffalo-hunters bound for the Neutral Strip and the Panhandle of Texas,
+where a small number of buffalo still remained at that time. We traveled
+across the entire southwestern part of Kansas, below the Santa F&eacute;
+railroad, at a time when the great land boom of 1886 and 1887 was at its
+height. Town-site schemes in western Kansas were at that time
+innumerable, and a steady stream of immigration was pouring westward by
+rail and wagon into the high and dry plains of the country, where at
+that time farming remained a doubtful experiment. In the course of our
+travels, <!-- Page 228 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>we saw one morning, rising before us in the mirage of the
+plains, what seemed to be a series of crenelated turrets, castles peaked
+and bastioned. We knew this was but the mirage, and knew that it must
+have some physical cause. But what was a town doing in that part of the
+world? We drove on and in a few hours found the town&mdash;a little, raw boom
+town of unpainted boards and tents, which had sprung up almost overnight
+in that far-off region. The population was that of the typical frontier
+town, and the pronounced belief of all was that this settlement was to
+be the commercial metropolis of the Southwest. This little town was
+later known as Woodsdale, Kansas. It offered then no hint of the bloody
+scenes in which it was soon to figure; but within a few weeks it was so
+deeply embroiled in war with the rival town of Hugoton as to make
+history notable even on that turbulent frontier.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Herbert M. Tonney, now a prosperous citizen of Flora, Illinois, was
+a resident of that portion of the country in the stirring days of the
+land boom, and became involved to an extent beyond his own seeking in
+this county seat fight. While serving as an officer of the peace, he was
+shot and left for dead. No story can <!-- Page 229 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span>serve so well as his personal
+narrative to convey a clear idea of the causes, methods and results of a
+typical county seat war in the West. His recountal follows:</p>
+
+<p>"I do not need to swear to the truthfulness of my story, for I have
+already done so in many courts and under the cross-examination of some
+of the ablest lawyers in the country. I have repeated the story on the
+stand in a criminal case which cost the United States government more
+money than it has ever expended in any similar trial, unless perhaps
+that having to do with the assassination of President Lincoln. I can say
+that I know what it is to be murdered.</p>
+
+<p>"In March, 1886, I moved out into southwestern Kansas, in what was later
+to be known as Stevens county, then a remote and apparently unattractive
+region. In 1885 a syndicate of citizens of McPherson, Kansas, had been
+formed for the purpose of starting a new town in southwestern Kansas.
+The members were leading bankers, lawyers, and merchants. These sent out
+an exploration party, among which were such men as Colonel C. E. Cook,
+former postmaster of McPherson; his brother, Orrin Cook, a lawyer; John
+Pancoast, J. B. Chamberlain, J. W. Calvert, John Robertson, and <!-- Page 230 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span>others.
+They located a section of school lands, in what was later known as
+Stevens county, as near the center of the proposed county as the range
+of sand dunes along the Cimarron river would permit. Others of the party
+located lands as close to the town site as possible. On August 3, 1886,
+Governor Martin issued a proclamation for the organization of Stevens
+county. It appeared upon the records of the State of Kansas that the new
+county had 2,662 <i>bona-fide</i> inhabitants, of whom 868 were householders.
+These claimed a taxable property, in excess of legal exemptions,
+amounting to $313,035, including railroad property of $140,380. I need
+not state that the organization was wholly based upon fraud. An election
+was called for September 9, and the town of Hugoton&mdash;at first called
+Hugo&mdash;was chosen.</p>
+
+<p>"There can be competition in the town-site business, however. At Mead
+Center, Kansas, there resided an old-time Kansas man, Colonel S. N.
+Wood, who also wanted a town site in the new county. Wood's partner,
+Captain I. C. Price, went down on July 3 to look over the situation. He
+was not known to the Hugoton men, and he was invited by Calvert, the
+census taker, to register his name as a citizen. He <!-- Page 231 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>protested that he
+was only a visitor, but was informed that this made no possible
+difference; whereupon, Price proceeded to register his own name, that of
+his partner, those of many of his friends, and many purely imaginary
+persons. He also registered the families of these persons, and
+finally&mdash;in a burst of good American humor&mdash;went so far as to credit
+certain single men of his acquaintance with large families, including
+twenty or thirty pairs of twins! This cheerful imagination on his part
+caused trouble afterwards; but certain it is that these fictitious
+names, twins and all, went into the sworn records of Hugoton&mdash;an unborn
+population of a defunct town, whose own conception was in iniquity!</p>
+
+<p>"Price located a section of government land on the north side of the
+sand hills, eight miles from Hugoton, and this was duly platted for a
+town site. Corner lots were selling at Hugoton for $1,000 apiece, and
+people were flocking to that town. The new town was called Woodsdale,
+and Colonel Wood offered lots free to any who would come and build upon
+them. Settlers now streamed to Woodsdale. Tents, white-topped wagons and
+frail shanties sprung up as though by magic. The Woodsdale <!-- Page 232 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>boom
+attracted even homesteaders who had cast in their lot with Hugoton. Many
+of these forgot their oaths in the land office, pulled up and filed on
+new quarter sections nearer to Woodsdale. The latter town was jubilant.
+Colonel Wood and Captain Price, in the month of August, held a big
+ratification meeting, taunting the men of Hugoton with those thirty
+pairs of twins that never were on land or sea. A great deal of bad blood
+was engendered at this time.</p>
+
+<p>"Soon after this Wood and Price started together for Garden City. They
+were followed by a band of Hugoton men and captured in a dugout on the
+Cimarron river. Brought back to Hugoton, a mock trial was held upon them
+and they were released on a mock bond, being later taken out of town
+under guard. A report was printed in the Hugoton paper that certain
+gentlemen of that town had gone south with Colonel Wood and Captain
+Price, 'for the purpose of a friendly buffalo hunt.' It was the
+intention to take these two prisoners into the wild and lawless region
+of No Man's Land, or the Panhandle of Texas, there to kill them, and to
+bring back the report that they were accidentally killed in the buffalo
+chase. This strange <!-- Page 233 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span>hunting party did go south, across No Man's Land
+and into the desert region lying around the headwaters of the Beaver.
+The prisoners knew what they were to expect, but, as it chanced, their
+captors did not dare kill them. Meantime, Woodsdale had organized a
+'posse' of twenty-four men, under Captain S. O. Aubrey, the noted
+frontier trailer, formerly an Indian scout. This band, taking up the
+trail below Hugoton, followed and rescued Wood and Price, and took
+prisoners the entire Hugoton 'posse.' The latter were taken to Garden
+City, and here the law was in turn set at defiance by the Woodsdale men,
+the horses, wagons, arms, etc., of the Hugoton party being put up and
+sold in the court to pay the board of the teams, expenses of
+publication, etc. Colonel Wood bought these effects in at public
+auction.</p>
+
+<p>"By this time, Stevens county had been organized and the Hugoton 'pull'
+was in the ascendency. A continuance had been taken at Garden City by
+the Hugoton prisoners, who were charged with kidnapping. The papers in
+this case were sent down from Finney county to the first session of the
+District Court of Stevens county. The result was foregone. <!-- Page 234 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>Tried by
+their friends, the prisoners were promptly discharged.</p>
+
+<p>"The feeling between the two towns was all the time growing more bitter.
+Cases had been brought against Calvert, the census-taker, for perjury,
+and action was taken looking toward the setting aside of the
+organization of the county. The Kansas legislature, however, now met,
+and the political 'pull' of Hugoton was still strong enough to secure a
+special act legalizing the organization of Stevens county. It was now
+the legislature against the Supreme Court; for a little later the
+Supreme Court declared that the organization had been made through open
+fraud and by means of perjury.</p>
+
+<p>"Naturally, trouble might have been expected at the fall election. There
+were two centers of population, two sets of leaders, two clans,
+separated by only eight miles of sand hills. There could be but one
+county seat and one set of officers. Here Woodsdale began to suffer, for
+her forces were divided among themselves.</p>
+
+<p>"Colonel Wood, the leader of this community, had slated John M. Cross as
+his candidate for sheriff. A rival for the nomination was Sam Robinson,
+who owned the hotel at Woodsdale, <!-- Page 235 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>and had invested considerable money
+there. Robinson was about forty years of age, and was known to be a bad
+man, credited with two or three killings elsewhere. Wood had always been
+able to flatter him and handle him; but when Cross was declared as the
+nominee for sheriff, Robinson became so embittered that he moved over to
+Hugoton, where he was later chosen town marshal and township constable.
+Hugoton men bought his hotel, leaving Robinson in the position of
+holding real estate in Woodsdale without owning the improvements on it.
+Hence when the town-site commissioners began to issue deeds, Robinson
+was debarred from claiming a deed by reason of the hotel property having
+been sold. Bert Nobel, a friend of Robinson's, sold his drug store and
+moved over with Robinson to Hugoton. Hugoton bought other property of
+Woodsdale malcontents, leaving the buildings standing at Woodsdale and
+taking the citizens to themselves. The Hugoton men put up as their
+candidate one Dalton, and declared him elected. Wood contested the
+election, and finally succeeded in getting his man Cross declared as
+sheriff of Stevens county.</p>
+
+<p>"It was now proposed to issue bonds for a <!-- Page 236 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>double line of railroad
+across this county, such bonds amounting to eight thousand dollars per
+mile. At this time, the population was largely one of adventurers, and
+there was hardly a foot of deeded land in the entire county. In the
+discussion over this bond election, Robinson got into trouble with the
+new sheriff, in which Robinson was clearly in the wrong, as he had no
+county jurisdiction, being at the time of the altercation outside of his
+own township and town. Later on, a warrant for Robinson's arrest was
+issued and placed in the hands of Ed Short, town marshal of Woodsdale.
+Short was known as a killer, and hence as a fit man to go after
+Robinson.<a name="FNanchor_I_9" id="FNanchor_I_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_I_9" class="fnanchor">[I]</a> He went to Hugoton to arrest Robinson, and there was a
+shooting affair, in which the citizens of Hugoton protected their man.
+The Woodsdale town marshal, however, still retained his warrant and
+cherished his purpose of arresting his man.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 237 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span></p><p>"On July 22 of this year, 1888, Short learned that Sam Robinson, the two
+Cooks, and a man by the name of Donald, together with some women and
+children, had gone on a picnic down in the Neutral Strip, south of the
+Stevens county line. Short raised a 'posse' of four or five men and
+started after Robinson, who was surprised in camp near Goff creek. There
+was a parley, which resulted in Robinson escaping on a fast horse, which
+was tied near the shack where he was stopping with his wife and
+children. Short, meantime, had sent back word to Woodsdale, stating that
+he needed help to take Robinson. Meantime, also, the Hugoton men,
+learning that Short had started down after Robinson, had sent out two
+strong parties to rescue the latter. A battle was imminent.</p>
+
+<p>"It was at this time that I myself appeared upon the scene of this
+turbulent and lawless drama, although, in my own case, I went as a
+somewhat unwilling participant and as a servant of the law, not
+anticipating consequences so grave as those which followed.</p>
+
+<p>"The sheriff of the county, John M. Cross, on receiving the message from
+Short, called for volunteers, which was equivalent to summoning a
+'posse.' He knew there was going to be <!-- Page 238 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>trouble, and left his money and
+watch behind him, stating that he feared for the result of his errand.
+His 'posse' was made up of Ted Eaton, Bob Hubbard, Rolland Wilcox, and
+myself. At that time I was only a boy, about nineteen years of age.</p>
+
+<p>"We had a long and hard ride to Reed's camp, on Goff creek, whence Short
+had sent up his message. Arriving there, we found Reed, who was catching
+wild horses, together with a man by the name of Patterson and another
+man, but Short was not in sight. From Reed we learned that Robinson had
+gotten away from Short, who had started back, leaving word for Mr.
+Cross, should he arrive, to return home. A band of men from Hugoton, we
+learned later, had overtaken Short and his men and chased them for
+twenty-five miles, but the latter reached Springfield, Seward county,
+unharmed.</p>
+
+<p>"Robinson, who had made his escape to a cow camp and thence to Hugoton
+upon a fresh horse, now met and led down into the Strip one of the first
+Hugoton 'posses.' Among them were Orrin Cook, Charles Cook, J. W.
+Calvert, J. B. Chamberlain, John Jackson, John A. Rutter, Fred Brewer,
+William Clark, and a <!-- Page 239 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>few others. Robinson was, of course, the leader of
+this band.</p>
+
+<p>"After Sheriff Cross asked me to go down with him to see what had become
+of Ed Short, I went over and got Wilcox and we rode down to the
+settlement of Voorhees. Thence we rode to Goff creek, and all reached
+Reed's camp about seven or eight o'clock on Wednesday morning, July 25,
+1888. Here we remained until about five o'clock of that afternoon, when
+we started for home. Our horses gave out, and we got off and led them
+until well on into the night.</p>
+
+<p>"At about moonrise, we came to a place in the Neutral Strip known as the
+'Hay Meadows,' where there was a sort of pool of standing water, at
+which settlers cut a kind of coarse hay. There was in camp there, making
+hay, an old man by the name of A. B. Haas, of Voorhees, and with him
+were his sons, C. and Keen Haas, as well as Dave Scott, a Hugoton
+partisan. When we met these people here, we concluded to stop for a
+while. Eaton and Wilcox got into the wagon-box and lay down. My horse
+got loose and I was a few minutes in repicketing him. I had not been
+lying down more than twenty minutes, when we were surprised by the
+<!-- Page 240 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>Hugoton 'posse' under Robinson. The latter had left the trail, which
+came down from the northeast, and were close upon us. They had evidently
+been watching us during the evening with field-glasses, as they seemed
+to know where we had stopped, and had completely surrounded us before we
+knew of their being near us.</p>
+
+<p>"The first I heard was Cross exclaiming, 'They have got us!' At that
+time there was shooting, and Robinson called out, 'Boys, close in!' He
+called out to Cross, 'Surrender, and hold up your hands!' Our arms were
+mostly against the haystacks. Not one of us fired a shot, or could have
+done so at that moment.</p>
+
+<p>"Sheriff Cross, Hubbard, and myself got up and stood together. We held
+up our hands. They did not seem to notice Wilcox and Eaton, who were
+lying in the wagon. Robinson called out to Cross, 'Give up your arms!'</p>
+
+<p>"'I have no arms,' replied Cross. He explained that his Winchester was
+on his saddle and that he had no revolver.</p>
+
+<p>"'I know better than that,' said Robinson. 'Search him!' Some one of the
+Hugoton party then went over Cross after weapons, and told Robinson that
+he had no arms.</p>
+
+<p>"'I know better,' reiterated Robinson. The <!-- Page 241 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span>others stood free at that
+moment, and Robinson exclaimed, 'Sheriff Cross, you are my first man.'
+He raised his Winchester and fired at Cross, a distance of a few feet,
+and I saw Cross fall dead at my side. It was all a sort of trance or
+dream to me. I did not seem to realize what was going on, but knew that
+I could make no resistance. My gun was not within reach. I knew that I,
+too, would be shot down.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"><a name="i271">
+<img src="images/i271.jpg" class="jpg" width="600" height="358" alt="THE McSWEEN STORE AND BANK; PROMINENT IN THE LINCOLN
+COUNTY WAR" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE McSWEEN STORE AND BANK; PROMINENT IN THE LINCOLN
+COUNTY WAR</span></a></div>
+
+<p>"Hubbard had now been disarmed, if indeed he had on any weapon. Robinson
+remarked to him, 'I want you, too!' and as he spoke he raised his
+Winchester and shot him dead, Hubbard also falling close to where I
+stood, his murderer being but a few feet from him.</p>
+
+<p>"I knew that my turn must come pretty soon. It was Chamberlain who was
+to be my executioner, J. B. Chamberlain, chairman of the board of county
+commissioners of Stevens county, and always prominent in Hugoton
+matters. Chamberlain was about eight feet from me, or perhaps less, when
+he raised his rifle deliberately to kill me. There were powder burns on
+my neck and face from the shot, as the woman who cared for me on the
+following day testified in court.</p>
+
+<p>"I saw the rifle leveled, and realized that I <!-- Page 242 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>was going to be killed.
+Instinctively, I flinched to one side of the line of the rifle. That
+saved my life. The ball entered the left side of my neck, about
+three-quarters of an inch from the carotid artery and about half an inch
+above the left clavicle, coming out through the left shoulder. I felt no
+pain at the time, and, indeed, did not feel pain until the next day. The
+shock of the shot knocked me down and numbed me, and I suppose I lay a
+minute or two before I recovered sensation or knew anything about my
+condition. It was supposed by all that I was killed, and, in a vague
+way, I agreed that I must be killed; that my spirit was simply present
+listening and seeing.</p>
+
+<p>"Eaton had now got out of the wagon, and he started to run towards the
+horses. Robinson and one or two others now turned and pursued him, and I
+heard a shot or so. Robinson came back and I heard him say, 'I have shot
+the &mdash;&mdash; &mdash;&mdash; &mdash;&mdash; who drew a gun on me!'</p>
+
+<p>"Then I heard the Hugoton men talking and declaring that they must have
+the fifth man of our party, whom they had not yet found. At this time,
+old man Haas and his sons came and stood near where I was and saw me
+looking up. The former, seeing that I was not dead, asked <!-- Page 243 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span>me where I
+had been shot. 'They have shot my arm off,' I answered him. At this
+moment I heard the Hugoton men starting toward me, and I dropped back
+and feigned death. Haas did not betray me. The Hugoton men now lit
+matches and peered into the faces of their victims to see if they were
+dead. I kept my eyes shut when the matches were held to my face, and
+held my breath.</p>
+
+<p>"They finally found Wilcox, I do not know just where, but they stood him
+up within fifteen feet of where I was lying feigning death. They asked
+Wilcox what he had been doing there, and he replied that he had just
+been down on the Strip looking around.</p>
+
+<p>"'That's a damned lie!' replied Robinson, the head executioner. As he
+spoke, he raised his Winchester and fired. Wilcox fell, and as he lay he
+moaned a little bit, as I heard:</p>
+
+<p>"'Put the fellow out of his misery,' remarked Robinson, carelessly. Some
+one then apparently fired a revolver shot and Wilcox became silent.</p>
+
+<p>"Some one came to me, took hold of my foot, and began to pull me around
+to see whether I was dead. Robinson wanted it made sure. Chamberlain, my
+executioner, said, 'He's dead; <!-- Page 244 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>I gave him a center shot. I don't need
+shoot a man twice at that distance.' Either Chamberlain or some one else
+took me by the legs, dragged me about, and kicked me in the side,
+leaving bruises which were visible for many days afterwards. I feigned
+death so well that they did not shoot me again. They did shoot a second
+time each of the others who lay near me. We found seven cartridges on
+the ground near where the killing was done. Eaton was shot at a little
+distance from us, and I do not know whether he was shot more than once
+or not.</p>
+
+<p>"The haymakers were now in trouble, and said that they could not go on
+putting up their hay with the corpses lying around. Robinson told them
+to hitch up and follow the Hugoton party away. They did this, and after
+a while I was left lying there in the half-moonlight, with the dead
+bodies of my friends for company.</p>
+
+<p>"After the party had been gone about twenty minutes, I found I could get
+on my feet, although I was very weak. At first, I went and examined
+Wilcox, Cross, and Hubbard, and found they were quite dead. Their belts
+and guns were gone. Then I went to get my <!-- Page 245 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>horse. It was hard for me to
+get into the saddle, and it has always seemed to me providential that I
+could do so at all. My horse was very wild and difficult to mount under
+ordinary circumstances. Now, it seemed to me that he knew my plight. It
+is certain that at that time and afterwards he was perfectly quiet and
+gentle, even when I laboriously tried to get into the saddle.</p>
+
+<p>"At a little distance, there was a buffalo wallow, with some filthy
+water in it. I led my horse here, lay down in the water, and drank a
+little of it. After that I rode about fifteen or sixteen miles along a
+trail, not fully knowing where I was going. In the morning, I met
+constable Herman Cann, of Voorhees, who had been told by the Haas party
+of the foregoing facts. Of course, we might expect a Hugoton 'posse' at
+any time. As a matter of fact, the same crowd who did the killing
+(fifteen of them, as I afterwards learned), after taking the haymakers
+back toward the State of Kansas, returned on their hunt for one of
+Short's men, who they supposed was still in that locality. It was
+probably not later than one or two o'clock in the morning when they
+found me gone.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 246 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span></p><p>"Our butchers now again sat down on the ground near the bodies of their
+victims, and they seem to have enjoyed themselves. There was talk that
+some beer bottles were emptied and left near the heads of their victims
+as markers, but whether this was deliberately done I cannot say.</p>
+
+<p>"Constable Cann later hid me in the middle of a cornfield. This, no
+doubt, saved my life, for the Hugoton scouts were soon down there the
+next morning, having discovered that one of the victims had come to
+life. Woodsdale had sent out two wagons with ice to bring in the bodies
+of the dead men, but these Hugoton scouts met them and made them ride
+through Hugoton, so that the assembled citizens of that town might see
+the corpses. The county attorney, William O'Connor, made a speech,
+demanding that Hugoton march on Woodsdale and kill Wood and Ed Short.</p>
+
+<p>"By this time, of course, all Woodsdale was also under arms. My friends
+gathered from all over the countryside, a large body of them, heavily
+armed. Mr. Cann, the constable, had tried to take me to Liberal, but I
+could not stand the ride. I was then taken to the house of a doctor in
+the settlement at LaFayette. On <!-- Page 247 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>the second night after the massacre I
+was taken to Woodsdale by about twenty of the Woodsdale boys, who came
+after me. We arrived at Woodsdale about daybreak next morning. In our
+night trip we could see the skyrocket signals used by the Robinson-Cook
+gang.</p>
+
+<p>"After my arrival at Woodsdale, it might have been supposed that all the
+country was in a state of war, instead of living in a time of modern
+civilization. Entrenchments were thrown up, rifle pits were dug, and
+stands established for sharp-shooters. Guards were thrown out all around
+the town, and mounted scouts continued to scour the country. Hugoton,
+expecting that Woodsdale would make an organized attack in retaliation,
+was quite as fully fortified in every way. Had there been a determined
+leader, the bloodshed would have been much greater. Of course, the
+result of this state of hostilities was that the governor sent out the
+militia, and there were investigations, and, later on, arrests and
+trials. The two towns literally fought each other to the death.</p>
+
+<p>"The murder of Sheriff Cross occurred in 1888. The militia were
+withdrawn within about thirty days thereafter. Both towns continued to
+break the law&mdash;in short, agreed jointly <!-- Page 248 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>to break the law. They drew up
+a stipulation, it is said, under which Colonel Wood was to have all the
+charges against the Hugoton men dismissed. In return, Wood was to have
+all the charges against him in Hugoton dismissed, and was to have safe
+conduct when he came up to court. Not even this compounding of felony
+was kept as a pact between these treacherous communities.</p>
+
+<p>"The trial lagged. Wood was once more under bond to appear at Hugoton,
+before the court of his enemy, Judge Botkin, and among many other of his
+Hugoton enemies. On the day that Colonel Wood was to go for his trial,
+June 23, 1891, he drove up in a buggy. In the vehicle with him were his
+wife and a Mrs. Perry Carpenter. Court was held in the Methodist church.
+At the time of Wood's arrival, the docket had been called and a number
+of cases set for trial, including one against Wood for arson&mdash;there was
+no crime in the calendar of which one town did not accuse the other,
+and, indeed, of which the citizens of either were not guilty.</p>
+
+<p>"Wood left the two ladies sitting in the buggy, near the door, and
+stepped up to the clerk's desk to look over some papers. As he <!-- Page 249 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>went in,
+he passed, leaning against the door, one Jim Brennan, a deputy of
+Hugoton, who did not seem to notice him. Brennan was a friend of C. E.
+Cook, then under conviction for the Hay Meadows massacre. Brennan stood
+talking to Mrs. Wood and Mrs. Carpenter, smiling and apparently
+pleasant. Colonel Wood turned and came down towards the door, again
+passing close to Brennan but not speaking to him. He was almost upon the
+point of climbing to his seat in the buggy, when Brennan, without a word
+and without any sort of warning, drew a revolver and shot him in the
+back. Wood wheeled around, and Brennan shot him the second time, through
+the right side. Not a word had been spoken by any one. Wood now started
+to run around the corner of the house. His wife, realizing now what was
+happening, sprang from the buggy-seat and followed to protect him.
+Brennan fired a third time, but missed. Mrs. Wood, reaching her
+husband's side, threw her arms around his neck. Brennan coming close up,
+fired a fourth shot, this time through Wood's head. The murdered man
+fell heavily, literally in his wife's arms, and for the moment it was
+thought both were killed. Brennan drew a second revolver, <!-- Page 250 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span>and so stood
+over Wood's corpse, refusing to surrender to any one but the sheriff of
+Morton county.</p>
+
+<p>"The presiding judge at this trial was Theodosius Botkin, a figure of
+peculiar eminence in Kansas at that time. Botkin gave Brennan into the
+custody of the sheriff of Morton county. He was removed from the county,
+and it need hardly be stated that when he was at last brought back for
+trial it was found impossible to empanel a jury, and he was set free. No
+one was ever punished for this cold-blooded murder.</p>
+
+<p>"Colonel S. N. Wood was an Ohio man, but moved to Kansas in the early
+Free Soil days. He was a friend and champion of old John Brown and a
+colonel of volunteers in the civil war. He had served in the legislature
+of Kansas, and was a good type of the early and adventurous pioneer.</p>
+
+<p>"Whether or not suspicion attached to Judge Botkin for his conduct in
+this matter, he himself seems to have feared revenge, for he held court
+with a Winchester at his hand and a brace of revolvers on the desk in
+front of him, his court-house always surrounded with an armed guard. He
+offended men in Seward county, <!-- Page 251 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span>and there was a plot made to kill him. A
+party lay in wait along the road to intercept Botkin on his journey from
+his homestead&mdash;every one in Kansas at that time had a 'claim'&mdash;but
+Botkin was warned by some friend. He sent out Sam Dunn, sheriff of
+Seward county, to discover the truth of the rumor. Dunn went on down the
+trail and, in a rough part of the country, was fired upon and killed,
+instead of Botkin. Arrests were made in this matter also, but the sham
+trials resulted much as had that of Brennan. The records of these trials
+may be seen in Seward county. It was murder for murder, anarchy for
+anarchy, evasion for evasion, in this portion of the frontier. Judge
+Botkin soon after this resigned his seat upon the bench and went to
+lecturing upon the virtues of the Keeley cure. Afterwards he went to the
+legislature&mdash;the same legislature which had once tried him on charges of
+impeachment as a judge!</p>
+
+<p>"These events all became known in time, and lawlessness proved its own
+inability to endure. The towns were abandoned. Where in 1889 there were
+perhaps 4,000 people, there remained not 100. The best of the farms were
+abandoned or sold for taxes, the late inhabitants <!-- Page 252 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span>of the two warring
+settlements wandering out over the world. The legislature, hoodwinked or
+cajoled heretofore, at length disorganized the county, and anarchy gave
+back its own to the wilderness.</p>
+
+<p>"I have indicated that the trial of the men guilty of assassinating my
+friends and of attempting to kill myself in the Hay Meadow butchery was
+one which reached a considerable importance at the time. The crimes were
+committed in that strange portion of the country called No Man's Land or
+the Neutral Strip. The accused were tried in the United States court at
+Paris, Texas. I myself drew the indictments against them. There were
+tried the Cooks, Chamberlain, Robinson and others of the Hugoton party,
+and of these six were convicted and sentenced to be hung. These men were
+defended by Colonel George R. Peck, later chief counsel of the Chicago,
+Milwaukee &amp; St. Paul Railway. With him were associated Judge John F.
+Dillon, of New York; W. H. Rossington, of St. Louis; Senator Manderson,
+of Nebraska; Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, and others. The Knights of
+Pythias raised a fund to defend the prisoners, and spent perhaps a
+hundred thousand dollars in all in this undertaking. <!-- Page 253 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span>A vast political
+'pull' was exercised at Topeka and Washington. After the sentence had
+been passed, the case was taken up to the United States Supreme Court,
+on the ground that the Texas court had no jurisdiction in the premises,
+and on the further grounds of errors in the trial. The United States
+Supreme Court, in 1891, reversed the Texas court, on an error on the
+admission of evidence, and remanded the cases. The men were never put on
+trial again, except that, in 1898, Sam Robinson, meantime pardoned out
+of the penitentiary in Colorado, where he had been sent for robbing the
+United States mails at Florissant, Colorado, returned to Texas, and was
+arrested on the old charge. The men convicted were C. E. Cook, Orrin
+Cook, Cyrus C. Freese, John Lawrence and John Jackson.</p>
+
+<p>"The Illinois legislature petitioned Congress to extend United States
+jurisdiction over No Man's Land, and so did the state of Indiana; and it
+was attached to the East District of Texas for the purposes of
+jurisdiction. Congressman Springer held up this bill for a time, using
+it as a club for the passage of a measure of his own upon which he was
+intent. Thus, it may be seen that the tawdry little tragedy in <!-- Page 254 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>that
+land which indeed was 'No Man's Land' in time attained a national
+prominence.</p>
+
+<p>"The collecting of the witnesses for this trial cost the United States
+government over one hundred thousand dollars. The trial was long and
+bitterly fought. It resulted, as did every attempt to convict those
+concerned in the bloody doings of Stevens county, in an absolute failure
+of the ends of justice. Of all the murders committed in that bitter
+fighting, not one murderer has ever been punished! Never was greater
+political or judicial mockery.</p>
+
+<p>"I had the singular experience, once in my life, of eating dinner at the
+same table with the man who brutally shot me down and left me for dead.
+J. B. Chamberlain, the man who shot me, and who thought he had killed
+me, came in with a friend and sat down at the same table in a
+Leavenworth, Kansas, restaurant, where I was eating. My opportunity for
+revenge was there. I did not take it. Chamberlain and his friend did not
+know who I was. I left the matter to the law, with what results the
+records of the law's failure in these matters has shown.</p>
+
+<p>"Of those who were tried for these murders, J. B. Chamberlain is now
+dead. C. E. Cook, <!-- Page 255 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span>who was much alarmed lest the cases might be
+reinstated in the year 1898, claims Quincy, Illinois, as his home, but
+has interests in Florida. O. J. Cook is dead. Jack Lawrence is dead.
+John Kelley is dead. Other actors in the drama, unconvicted, are also
+dead or nameless wanderers. As the indictments were all quashed in 1898,
+Sam Robinson, whose whereabouts is unknown, will never be brought to
+trial for his deeds in the Hay Meadow butchery. He was not tried at
+Paris, being then in the Colorado penitentiary. His friend and partner,
+Bert Nobel, who was sent to the penitentiary for seven years for
+participating in the postoffice robbery, was pardoned out, and later
+killed a policeman at Trinidad, Colorado. He was tried there and hanged.
+So far as I know, this is the only legal punishment ever inflicted upon
+any of the Hugoton or Woodsdale men, who outvied each other in a
+lawlessness for which anarchy would be a mild name."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page 256 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Chapter_XVI" id="Chapter_XVI"></a>Chapter XVI</h2>
+
+<p>Biographies of Bad Men&mdash;<i>Desperadoes of the Deserts</i>&mdash;<i>Billy the Kid,
+Jesse Evans, Joel Fowler, and Others Skilled in the Art of Gun
+Fighting</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p>The desert regions of the West seemed always to breed truculence and
+touchiness. Some of the most desperate outlaws have been those of
+western Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. These have sometimes been
+Mexicans, sometimes half-breed Indians, very rarely full-blood or
+half-blood negroes. The latter race breeds criminals, but lacks in the
+initiative required in the character of the desperado. Texas and the
+great arid regions west of Texas produced rather more than their full
+quota of bad white men who took naturally to the gun.</p>
+
+<p>By all means the most prominent figure in the general fighting along the
+Southwestern <!-- Page 257 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span>border, which found climax in the Lincoln County War, was
+that historic and somewhat romantic character known as Billy the Kid,
+who had more than a score of killings to his credit at the time of his
+death at the age of twenty-one. His character may not be chosen as an
+exemplar for youth, but he affords an instance hardly to be surpassed of
+the typical bad man.</p>
+
+<p>The true name of Billy the Kid was William H. Bonney, and he was born in
+New York City, November 23, 1859. His father removed to Coffeyville, on
+the border of the Indian Nations, in 1862, where soon after he died,
+leaving a widow and two sons. Mrs. Bonney again moved, this time to
+Colorado, where she married again, her second husband being named
+Antrim. All the time clinging to what was the wild border, these two now
+moved down to Santa F&eacute;, New Mexico, where they remained until Billy was
+eight years of age. In 1868, the family made their home at Silver City,
+New Mexico, where they lived until 1871, when Billy was twelve years of
+age. His life until then had been one of shifting about, in poverty or
+at best rude comfort. His mother seems to have been a wholesome
+Irishwoman, of no great <!-- Page 258 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>education, but of good instincts. Of the boy's
+father nothing is known; and of his stepfather little more, except that
+he was abusive to the stepchildren. Antrim survived his wife, who died
+about 1870. The Kid always said that his stepfather was the cause of his
+"getting off wrong."</p>
+
+<p>The Kid was only twelve years old when, in a saloon row in which a
+friend of his was being beaten, he killed with a pocket-knife a man who
+had previously insulted him. Some say that this was an insult offered to
+his mother; others deny it and say that the man had attempted to
+horsewhip Billy. The boy turned up with a companion at Fort Bowie, Pima
+county, Arizona, and was around the reservation for a while. At last he
+and his associate, who appears to have been as well saturated with
+border doctrine as himself at tender years, stole some horses from a
+band of Apaches, and incidentally killed three of the latter in a night
+attack. They made their first step at easy living in this enterprise,
+and, young as they were, got means in this way to travel about over
+Arizona. They presently turned up at Tucson, where Billy began to employ
+his precocious skill at cards; and where, presently, in the
+<!-- Page 259 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span>inevitable gambler's quarrel, he killed another man. He fled across
+the line now into old Mexico, where, in the state of Sonora, he set up
+as a youthful gambler. Here he killed a gambler, Jos&eacute; Martinez, over a
+monte game, on an "even break," being the fraction of a second the
+quicker on the draw. He was already beginning to show his natural
+fitness as a handler of weapons. He kept up his record by appearing next
+at Chihuahua and robbing a few monte dealers there, killing one whom he
+waylaid with a new companion by the name of Segura.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 224px;"><a name="i291">
+<img src="images/i291.jpg" class="jpg" width="224" height="400" alt="BILLY THE KID
+Said to have slain twenty-two men in his short career. Killed when
+twenty-one years old by Sheriff Pat F. Garrett" title="" />
+<span class="caption">BILLY THE KID</span></a></div>
+<p class="center">Said to have slain twenty-two men in his short career.<br /> Killed when
+twenty-one years old by Sheriff Pat F. Garrett</p>
+
+<p>The Kid was now old enough to be dangerous, and his life had been one of
+irresponsibility and lawlessness. He was nearly at his physical growth
+at this time, possibly five feet seven and a half inches in height, and
+weighing a hundred and thirty-five pounds. He was always slight and
+lean, a hard rider all his life, and never old enough to begin to take
+on flesh. His hair was light or light brown, and his eyes blue or
+blue-gray, with curious red hazel spots in them. His face was rather
+long, his chin narrow but long, and his front teeth were a trifle
+prominent. He was always a pleasant mannered youth, hopeful and buoyant,
+never <!-- Page 260 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span>glum or grim, and he nearly always smiled when talking.</p>
+
+<p>The Southwestern border at this time offered but few opportunities for
+making an honest living. There were the mines and there were the cow
+ranches. It was natural that the half-wild life of the cow punchers
+would sooner or later appeal to the Kid. He and Jesse Evans met
+somewhere along the lower border a party of punchers, among whom were
+Billy Morton and Frank Baker, as well as James McDaniels; the last named
+being the man who gave Billy his name of "The Kid," which hung to him
+all his life.</p>
+
+<p>The Kid arrived in the Seven Rivers country on foot. In his course east
+over the mountains from Mesilla to the Pecos valley he had been mixed up
+with a companion, Tom O'Keefe, in a fight with some more Apaches, of
+whom the Kid is reported to have killed one or more. There is no doubt
+that the Guadalupe mountains, which he crossed, were at that time a
+dangerous Indian country. That the Kid worked for a time for John
+Chisum, on his ranch near Roswell, is well known, as is the fact that he
+cherished a grudge against Chisum for years, and was more than once upon
+the <!-- Page 261 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>point of killing him for a real or fancied grievance. He left
+Chisum and took service with J. H. Tunstall on his Feliz ranch late in
+the winter of 1877, animated by what reason we may not know. In doing
+this, he may have acted from pique or spite or hatred. There was some
+quarrel between him and his late associates. Tunstall was killed by the
+Murphy faction on February 18, 1878. From that time, the path of the Kid
+is very plain and his acts well known and authenticated. He had by this
+time killed several men, certainly at least two white men; and how many
+Mexicans and Indians he had killed by fair means or foul will never be
+really known. His reputation as a gun fighter was well established.</p>
+
+<p>Dick Brewer, Tunstall's foreman, was now sworn in as a "special deputy"
+by McSween, and a war of reprisal was now on. The Kid was soon in the
+saddle with Brewer and after his former friends, all Murphy allies.
+There were about a dozen in this posse. On March 6, 1878, these men
+discovered and captured a band of five men, including Frank Baker and
+Billy Morton, both old friends of the Kid, at the lower crossing of the
+Rio Pe&ntilde;asco, some six miles from the Pecos. The prisoners were kept
+<!-- Page 262 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span>over night at Chisum's ranch, and then the posse started with them for
+Lincoln, not taking the Hondo-Bonito trail, but one <i>via</i> the Agua
+Negra, on the east side of the Capitans; proof enough that something
+bloody was in contemplation, for that was far from any settlements.
+Apologists of the Kid say that Morton and Baker "tried to escape," and
+that the Kid followed and killed them. The truth in all probability is
+that the party, sullen and bloody-minded, rode on, waiting until wrath
+or whiskey should inflame them so as to give resolution for the act they
+all along intended. The Kid, youngest but most determined of the band,
+no doubt did the killing of Billy Morton and Frank Baker; and in all
+likelihood there is truth in the assertion that they were on their knees
+and begging for their lives when he shot them. McClosky was killed by
+McNab, on the principle that dead men tell no tales. This killing was on
+March 9, 1878. The murder of Sheriff William Brady and George Hindman by
+the Kid and his half-dozen companions occurred April 1, 1878, and it is
+another act which can have no palliation whatever.</p>
+
+<p>The Kid was now assuming prominence as a gun fighter and leader, young
+as he was. After <!-- Page 263 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span>the big fight in Lincoln was over, and the McSween
+house in flames, the Kid was leader of the sortie which took him and a
+few of his companions to safety. The list of killings back of him was
+now steadily lengthening, and, indeed, one murder followed another so
+fast all over that country that it was hard to keep track of them all.</p>
+
+<p>The killing of the Indian agency clerk, Bernstein, August 5, 1878, on a
+horse-stealing expedition, was the next act of the Kid and his men, who
+thereafter fled northeast, out through the Capitan Gap, to certain old
+haunts around Fort Sumner, some ninety miles north of Roswell, up the
+Pecos valley. Here a little band of outlaws, led by the Kid, lived for a
+time as they could by stealing horses along the Bonito and around the
+Capitans, and running them off north and east. There were in this band
+at the time the Kid, Charlie Bowdre, Doc Skurlock, Wayt, Tom O'Folliard,
+Hendry Brown and Jack Middleton. Some or all of these were in the march
+with stolen horses which the Kid engineered that fall, going as far east
+as Atacosa, on the Canadian, before the stock was all gotten rid of.
+Middleton, Wayt, and Hendry Brown there left the Kid's gang, telling him
+that he <!-- Page 264 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span>would get killed before long; but the latter laughed at them
+and returned to his old grounds, alternating between Lincoln and Fort
+Sumner, and now and then stealing some cows from the Chisum herd.</p>
+
+<p>In January, 1880, the Kid enlarged his list of victims by killing, in a
+very justifiable encounter, a bad man from the Panhandle by the name of
+Grant, who had been loafing around in his country, and who, no doubt,
+intended to kill the Kid for the glory of it. The Kid had, a few moments
+before he shot Grant, taken the precaution to set the hammer of the
+latter's revolver on an "empty," as he whirled it over in examination.
+They were apparently friends, but the Kid knew that Grant was drunk and
+bloodthirsty. He shot Grant twice through the throat, as Grant snapped
+his pistol in his face. Nothing was done with the Kid for this, of
+course.</p>
+
+<p>Birds of a feather now began to appear in the neighborhood of Fort
+Sumner, and the Kid's gang was increased by the addition of Tom Pickett,
+and later by Billy Wilson, Dave Rudabaugh, Buck Edwards, and one or two
+others. These men stole cattle now from ranges as far east as the
+Canadian, and sold them to obliging <!-- Page 265 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span>butcher-shops at the new mining
+camp of White Oaks, just coming into prominence; or, again, they took
+cattle from the lower Pecos herds and sold them north at Las Vegas; or
+perhaps they stole horses at the Indian reservation and distributed them
+along the Pecos valley. Their operations covered a country more than two
+hundred miles across in either direction. They had accomplices and
+friends in nearly every little <i>placita</i> of the country. Sometimes they
+gave a man a horse as a present. If he took it, it meant that they could
+depend upon him to keep silent. Partly by friendliness and partly by
+terrorizing, their influence was extended until they became a power in
+all that portion of the country; and their self-confidence had now
+arisen to the point that they thought none dared to molest them, while
+in general they behaved in the high-handed fashion of true border
+bandits. This was the heyday of the Kid's career.</p>
+
+<p>It was on November 27, 1880, that the Kid next added to his list of
+killings. The men of White Oaks, headed by deputy sheriff William
+Hudgens, saloon-keeper of White Oaks, formed a posse, after the fashion
+of the day, and started out after the Kid, who had passed all bounds in
+impudence of late. In this posse <!-- Page 266 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span>were Hudgens and his brother, Johnny
+Hudgens, Jim Watts, John Mosby, Jim Brent, J. P. Langston, Ed. Bonnell,
+W. G. Dorsey, J. W. Bell, J. P. Eaker, Charles Kelly, and Jimmy Carlyle.
+They bayed up the Kid and his gang in the Greathouse ranch, forty miles
+from White Oaks, and laid siege, although the weather was bitterly cold
+and the party had not supplies or blankets for a long stay. Hudgens
+demanded the surrender of the Kid, and the latter said he could not be
+taken alive. Hudgens then sent word for Billy Wilson to come out and
+have a talk. The latter refused, but said he would talk with Jimmy
+Carlyle, if the latter would come into the house. Carlyle, against the
+advice of all, took off his pistol belt and stepped into the house. He
+was kept there for hours. About two o'clock in the afternoon they heard
+the window glass crash and saw Carlyle break through the window and
+start to run. Several shots followed, and Carlyle fell dead, the bullets
+that killed him cutting dust in the faces of Hudgens' men, as they lay
+across the road from the house.</p>
+
+<p>This murder was a nail in the Kid's coffin, for Carlyle was well liked
+at White Oaks. By this time the toils began to tighten in all
+directions. <!-- Page 267 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span>The United States Government had a detective, Azariah F.
+Wild, in Lincoln county. Pat Garrett had now just been elected sheriff,
+and was after the outlaws. Frank Stewart, a cattle detective, with a
+party of several men, was also in from the Canadian country looking for
+the Kid and his gang for thefts committed over to the east of Lincoln
+county, across the lines of Texas and the Neutral Strip. The Kid at this
+time wrote to Captain J. C. Lea, at Roswell, that if the officers would
+leave him alone for a time, until he could get his stuff together, he
+would pull up and leave the country, going to old Mexico, but that if he
+was crowded by Garrett or any one else, he surely would start in and do
+some more killing. This did not deter Garrett, who, with a posse made up
+of Chambers, Barney Mason, Frank Stewart, Juan Roibal, Lee Halls, Jim
+East, "Poker Tom," "Tenderfoot Bob," and "The Animal," with others, all
+more or less game, or at least game enough to go as far as Fort Sumner,
+at length rounded up the Kid, and took him, Billy Wilson, Tom Pickett
+and Dave Rudabaugh; Garrett killing O'Folliard and Bowdre.</p>
+
+<p>Pickett was left at Las Vegas, as there was no United States warrant out
+against him. <!-- Page 268 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span>Rudabaugh was tried later for robbing the United States
+mails, later tried for killing his jailer, and was convicted and
+sentenced to be hung; but once more escaped from the Las Vegas jail and
+got away for good. The Kid was not so fortunate. He was tried at
+Mesilla, before Judge Warren H. Bristol, the same man whose life he was
+charged with attempting in 1879. Judge Bristol appointed Judge Ira E.
+Leonard, of Lincoln, to defend the prisoner, and Leonard got him
+acquitted of the charge of killing Bernstein on the reservation. He was
+next tried, at the same term of court, for the killing of Sheriff
+William Brady, and in March, 1881, he was convicted under this charge
+and sentenced to be hanged at Lincoln on May 13, 1881. He was first
+placed under guard of Deputies Bob Ollinger and Dave Woods, and taken
+across the mountains in the custody of Sheriff Garrett, who received his
+prisoner at Fort Stanton on April 21.</p>
+
+<p>Lincoln county was just beginning to emerge from savagery. There was no
+jail worth the name, and all the county could claim as a place for the
+house of law and order was the big store building lately owned by
+Murphy, Riley &amp; Dolan. It was necessary to keep the Kid under <!-- Page 269 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span>guard for
+the three weeks or so before his execution, and Sheriff Garrett chose as
+the best available material Bob Ollinger and J. W. Bell, a good, quiet
+man from White Oaks, to act as the death watch over this dangerous man,
+who seemed now to be nearly at the end of his day.</p>
+
+<p>Against Bob Ollinger the Kid cherished an undying hatred, and longed to
+kill him. Ollinger hated him as much, and wanted nothing so much as to
+kill the Kid. He was a friend of Bob Beckwith, whom the Kid had killed,
+and the two had always been on the opposite sides of the Lincoln county
+fighting. Ollinger taunted the Kid with his deeds, and showed his own
+hatred in every way. There are many stories about what now took place in
+this old building at the side of bloody little Lincoln street. A common
+report is that in the evening of April 28, 1881, the Kid was left alone
+in the room with Bell, Ollinger having gone across the street for
+supper; that the Kid slipped his hands out of his irons&mdash;as he was able
+to do when he liked, his hands being very small&mdash;struck Bell over the
+head with his shackles while Bell was reading or was looking out of the
+window, later drawing Bell's revolver from its scabbard and killing him
+with it. This story <!-- Page 270 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span>is not correct. The truth is that Bell took the
+Kid, at his request, into the yard back of the jail; returning, the Kid
+sprang quickly up the stairs to the guard-room door, as Bell turned to
+say something to old man Goss, a cook, who was standing in the yard. The
+Kid pushed open the door, caught up a revolver from a table, and sprang
+to the head of the stairs just as Bell turned the angle and started up.
+He fired at Bell and missed him, the ball striking the left-hand side of
+the staircase. It glanced, however, and passed through Bell's body,
+lodging in the wall at the angle of the stair. Bell staggered out into
+the yard and fell dead. This story is borne out by the reports of Goss
+and the Kid, and by the bullet marks. The place is very familiar to the
+author, who at about that time practiced law in the same building, when
+it was used as the Court House, and who has also talked with many men
+about the circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>The Kid now sprang into the next room and caught up Ollinger's heavy
+shotgun, loaded with the very shells Ollinger had charged for him. He
+saw Ollinger coming across the street, and just as he got below the
+window at the corner of the building the Kid leaned over and <!-- Page 271 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>said,
+coolly and pleasantly, "Hello, old fellow!" The next instant he fired
+and shot Ollinger dead. He then walked around through the room and out
+upon the porch, which at that time extended the full length of the
+building, and, coming again in view of Ollinger's body, took a second
+deliberate shot at it. Then he broke the gun across the railing and
+threw the pieces down on Ollinger's body. "Take that to hell with you,"
+he said coolly. Then, seeing himself free and once more king of Lincoln
+street, he warned away all who would approach, and, with a file which he
+compelled Goss to bring to him, started to file off one of his leg
+irons. He got one free, ordered a bystander to bring him a horse, and at
+length, mounting, rode away for the Capitans, and so to a country with
+which he had long been familiar. At Las Tablas he forced a Mexican
+blacksmith to free him of his irons. He sent the horse, which belonged
+to Billy Burt, back by some unknown friend the following night.</p>
+
+<p>He was now again on his native heath, a desperado and an outlaw indeed,
+and obliged to fight for his life at every turn; for now he knew the
+country would turn against him, and, as he had been captured through
+information furnished <!-- Page 272 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span>through supposed friends, he knew that treachery
+was what he might expect. He knew also that sheriff Garrett would never
+give him up now, and that one or the other of the two must die.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, knowing all these things, the Kid, by means of stolen horses, broke
+back once more to his old stamping grounds around Fort Sumner. Garrett
+again got on his trail, and as the Kid, with incredible fatuity, still
+hung around his old haunts, he was at length able to close with him once
+more. With his deputies, John Poe and Thomas P. McKinney, he located the
+Kid in Sumner, although no one seemed to be explicit as to his
+whereabouts. He went to Pete Maxwell's house himself, and there, as his
+two deputies were sitting at the edge of the gallery in the moonlight,
+he killed the Kid at Maxwell's bedside.</p>
+
+<p>Billy the Kid had very many actual friends, whom he won by his pleasant
+and cheerful manners and his liberality, when he had anything with which
+to be liberal, although that was not often. He was very popular among
+the Mexicans of the Pecos valley. As to the men the Kid killed in his
+short twenty-one years, that is a matter of disagreement. The usual
+story <!-- Page 273 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span>is twenty-one, and the Kid is said to have declared he wanted
+to kill two more&mdash;Bob Ollinger and "Bonnie" Baca&mdash;before he died, to
+make it twenty-three in all. Pat Garrett says the Kid had killed eleven
+men. Others say he had killed nine. A very few say that the Kid never
+killed any man without full justification and in self-defense. They
+regard the Kid as a scapegoat for the sins of others. Indeed, he was
+less fortunate than some others, but his deeds brought him his deserts
+at last, even as they left him an enduring reputation as one of the most
+desperate desperadoes ever known in the West.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 262px;"><a name="i307">
+<img src="images/i307.jpg" width="262" height="400" alt="From a painting by John W. Norton
+&quot;THE NEXT INSTANT HE FIRED AND SHOT OLLINGER DEAD&quot;" title="" />
+<span class="caption"><span style='font-size:small'>From a painting by John W. Norton</span></span></a></div>
+<p class="center"><b>&quot;THE NEXT INSTANT HE FIRED AND SHOT OLLINGER DEAD&quot;</b></p>
+
+
+<p>Central and eastern New Mexico, from 1860 to 1880, probably held more
+desperate and dangerous men than any other corner of the West ever did.
+It was a region then more remote and less known than Africa is to-day,
+and no record exists of more than a small portion of its deeds of blood.
+Nowhere in the world was human life ever held cheaper, and never was any
+population more lawless. There were no courts and no officers, and most
+of the scattered inhabitants of that time had come thither to escape
+courts and officers. This environment which produced Billy the Kid
+brought out others <!-- Page 274 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span>scarcely less dangerous, and of a few of these there
+may be made passing mention.</p>
+
+<p>Joel Fowler was long considered a dangerous man. He was a ranch owner
+and cow man, but he came into the settlements often, and nearly always
+for the immediate purpose of getting drunk. In the latter condition he
+was always bloodthirsty and quarrelsome, and none could tell what or
+whom he might make the object of his attack. He was very insulting and
+overbearing, very noisy and obnoxious, the sort of desperado who makes
+unarmed men beg and compels "tenderfeet" to dance for his amusement. His
+birth and earlier life seem hidden by his later career, when, at about
+middle life, he lived in central New Mexico. He was accredited with
+killing about twenty men, but there may have been the usual exaggeration
+regarding this. His end came in 1884, at Socorro. He was arrested for
+killing his own ranch foreman, Jack Cale, a man who had befriended him
+and taken care of him in many a drunken orgy. He stabbed Cale as they
+stood at the bar in a saloon, and while every one thought he was
+unarmed. The law against carrying arms while in the settlements was then
+just beginning to be enforced; and, although it <!-- Page 275 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span>was recognized as
+necessary for men to go armed while journeying across those wild and
+little settled plains, the danger of allowing six-shooters and whiskey
+to operate at the same time was generally recognized as well. If a man
+did not lay aside his guns on reaching a town, he was apt to be invited
+to do so by the sheriff or town marshal, as Joel had already been asked
+that evening.</p>
+
+<p>Fowler's victim staggered to the door after he was stabbed and fell dead
+at the street, the act being seen by many. The law was allowed to take
+its course, and Fowler was tried and sentenced to be hanged. His lawyers
+took an appeal on a technicality and sent the case to the supreme court,
+where a long delay seemed inevitable. The jail was so bad that an
+expensive guard had to be maintained. At length, some of the citizens
+concluded that to hang Fowler was best for all concerned. They took him,
+mounted, to a spot some distance up the railroad, and there hanged him.
+Bill Howard, a negro section hand, was permitted by his section boss to
+make a coffin and bury Fowler, a matter which the Committee had
+neglected; and he says that he knows Fowler was buried there and left
+there for several years, near the <!-- Page 276 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>railway tracks. The usual story says
+that Fowler was hanged to a telegraph pole in town. At any rate, he was
+hanged, and a very wise and seemly thing it was.</p>
+
+<p>Jesse Evans was another bad man of this date, a young fellow in his
+early twenties when he first came to the Pecos country, but good enough
+at gun work to make his services desirable. He was one of the very few
+men who did not fear Billy the Kid. He always said that the Kid might
+beat him with the Winchester, but that he feared no man living with the
+six-shooter. Evans came very near meeting an inglorious death. He and
+the notorious Tom Hill once held up an old German in a sheep camp near
+what is now Alamagordo, New Mexico. The old man did not know that they
+were bad men, and while they were looting his wagon, looking for the
+money he had in a box under the wagon seat, he slipped up and killed Tom
+Hill with his own gun, which had been left resting against a bush near
+by, nearly shooting Hill's spine out. Then he opened fire on Jesse, who
+was close by, shooting him twice, through the arm and through the lungs.
+The latter managed to get on his horse, bareback, and rode that night,
+wounded as he was, and <!-- Page 277 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span>partly trailed by the blood from his lungs,
+sixty miles or more to the San Augustine mountains, where he holed up at
+a friendly ranch, later to be arrested by Constable Dave Wood, from the
+railway settlements. In default of better jurisdiction, he was taken to
+Fort Stanton, where he lay in the hospital until he got ready to escape,
+when he seems to have walked away. Evans and his brother, who was known
+as George Davis&mdash;the latter being the true name of both&mdash;then went down
+toward Pecos City and got into a fight with some rangers, who killed his
+brother on the spot and captured Jesse, who was confined in the Texas
+penitentiary for twenty years. He escaped and was returned; yet in the
+year 1882, when he should have been in the Texas prison, he is said to
+have been seen and recognized on the streets of Lincoln. Evans, or
+Davis, is said to have been a Texarkana man, and to have returned to his
+home soon after this, only to find his wife living with another man, and
+supposing her first husband dead. He did not tell the new husband of his
+presence, but took away with him his boy, whom he found now well grown.
+It was stated that he went to Arizona, and nothing more is known of him.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 278 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span></p><p>Tom Hill, the man above mentioned as killed by the sheep man, was a
+typical rough, dark, swarthy, low-browed, as loud-mouthed as he was
+ignorant. He was a braggart, but none the less a killer.</p>
+
+<p>Charlie Bowdre is supposed to have been a Texas boy, as was Tom Hill.
+Bowdre had a little ranch on the Rio Ruidoso, twenty miles or so from
+Lincoln; but few of these restless characters did much farming. It was
+easier to steal cattle, and to eat beef free if one were hungry. Bowdre
+joined Billy the Kid's gang and turned outlaw for a trade. It was all
+over with his chances of settling down after that. He was a man who
+liked to talk of what he could do, and a very steady practicer with the
+six-shooter, with which weapon he was a good shot, or just good enough
+to get himself killed by sheriff Pat Garrett.</p>
+
+<p>Frank Baker, murdered by his former friend, Billy the Kid, at Agua
+Negra, near the Capitans, was part Cherokee in blood, a well-spoken and
+pleasant man and a good cow hand. He was drawn into this fighting
+through his work for Chisum as a hired man. Baker was said to be
+connected with a good family in Virginia, who looked up the facts of his
+death.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 279 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span></p><p>Billy Morton, killed with Baker by the Kid, was a similar instance of a
+young man loving the saddle and six-shooter and finally getting tangled
+up with matters outside his proper sphere as a cow hand. He had often
+ridden with the Kid on the cow range. He was said to have been with the
+posse that killed Tunstall.</p>
+
+<p>Hendry Brown was a crack gun fighter, whose services were valued in the
+posse fighting. He went to Kansas and long served as marshal of
+Caldwell. He could not stand it to be good, and was killed after robbing
+the bank and killing the cashier.</p>
+
+<p>Johnny Hurley was a brave young man, as brave as a lion. Hurley was
+acting as deputy for sheriff John Poe, together with Jim Brent, when the
+desperado Arragon was holed up in an adobe and refused to surrender. The
+Mexican shot Hurley as he carelessly crossed an open space directly in
+front of the door. Hurley was brown-haired and blue-eyed; a very
+pleasant fellow.</p>
+
+<p>Andy Boyle, one of the rough and ruthless sort of warriors, was an
+ex-British soldier, a drunkard, and a good deal of a ruffian. He drank
+himself to death after a decidedly mixed record.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 280 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span></p><p>John McKinney had a certain fame from the fact that in the fight at the
+McSween house the Kid shot off half his mustache for him at close range,
+when the latter broke out of cover and ran.</p>
+
+<p>The tough buffalo hunter, Bill Campbell, who figured largely in bloody
+deeds in New Mexico, was arrested, but escaped from Fort Stanton, and
+was never heard from afterward. He came from Texas, but little is known
+of him. His name, as earlier stated, is thought to have been Ed.
+Richardson.</p>
+
+<p>Captain Joseph C. Lea, the staunch friend of Pat Garrett, and the man
+who first brought him forward as a candidate for sheriff of Lincoln
+county, died February 8, 1904, at Roswell, where he lived for a long
+time. Lea was said to have been a Quantrell man in the Lawrence
+massacre. Much of the population of that region had a history that was
+never written. Lea was a good man and much respected, peaceable,
+courteous and generous.</p>
+
+<p>One more southwestern bad man found Texas congenial after the close of
+his active fighting, and his is a striking story. Billy Wilson was a
+gentlemanly and good-looking young fellow, who ran with Billy the Kid's
+gang. <!-- Page 281 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span>Wilson was arrested on a United States warrant, charged with
+passing counterfeit money; but he later escaped and disappeared. Several
+years after all these events had happened, and after the country had
+settled down into quiet, a certain ex-sheriff of Lincoln county chanced
+to be near Uvalde, Texas, for several months. There came to him without
+invitation, a former merchant of White Oaks, New Mexico, who told the
+officer that Billy Wilson, under another name, was living below Uvalde,
+towards the Mexican frontier. He stated that Wilson had been a cow hand,
+a ranch foreman and cow man, was now doing well, had resigned all his
+bad habits, and was a good citizen. He stated that Wilson had heard of
+the officer's presence and asked whether the latter would not forego
+following up a reformed man on the old charges of another and different
+day. The officer replied at once that if Wilson was indeed leading a
+right life, and did not intend to go bad again, he would not only leave
+him alone, but would endeavor to secure for him a pardon from the
+president of the United States. Less than six months from that time,
+this pardon, signed by President Grover Cleveland, was in the possession
+of this officer, in his office in a Rio Grande <!-- Page 282 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span>town of New Mexico. A
+telegram was sent to Billy Wilson, and he was brave man enough to come
+and take his chances. The officer, without much speech, went over to his
+safe, took out the signed pardon from the president, and handed it to
+Wilson. The latter trembled and broke into tears as he took the paper.
+"If you ever need my life," said he, "count on me. And I'll never go
+back on this!" as he touched the executive pardon. He went back to
+Texas, and is living there to-day, a good citizen. It would be wrong to
+mention names in an incident like this.</p>
+
+<p>Tom O'Folliard was another noted character. He was something of a gun
+expert, in his own belief, at least. He was a man of medium height and
+dark complexion, and of no very great amount of mental capacity. He came
+into the lower range from somewhere east, probably from Texas, and
+little is known of him except that he was in some fighting, and that he
+is buried at Sumner with Bowdre and the Kid. He got away with one or two
+bluffs and encounters, and came to think that he was as good as the best
+of men, or rather as bad as the worst; for he was one of those who
+wanted a reputation as a bad man.</p>
+
+<p>Tom Pickett was another not far from the <!-- Page 283 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span>O'Folliard class, ambitious to
+be thought wild and woolly and hard to curry; which he was not, when it
+came to the real currying, as events proved. He was a very pretty
+handler of a gun, and took pride in his skill with it. He seems to have
+behaved well after the arrest of the Kid's gang near Sumner, and is not
+known in connection with any further criminal acts, though he still for
+a long time wore two guns in the settlements. Once a well-known sheriff
+happened, by mere chance, to be in his town, not knowing Pickett was
+there. The latter literally took to the woods, thinking something was on
+foot in which he was concerned. Being reminded that he had lost an
+opportunity to show how bad he was he explained: "I don't want anything
+to do with that long-legs." Pickett, no doubt, settled down and became a
+useful man. Indeed, although it seems a strange thing to say, it is the
+truth that much of the old wildness of that border was a matter of
+general custom, one might also say of habit. The surroundings were wild,
+and men got to running wild. When times changed, some of them also
+changed, and frequently showed that after all they could settle down to
+work and lead decent lives. Lawlessness is sometimes less a matter of
+temperament than of surroundings.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page 284 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Chapter_XVII" id="Chapter_XVII"></a>Chapter XVII</h2>
+
+<p>The Fight of Buckshot Roberts&mdash;<i>Encounter Between a Crippled Ex-Soldier
+and the Band of Billy the Kid</i>&mdash;<i>One Man Against Thirteen.</i></p>
+
+
+<p>Next to the fight of Wild Bill with the McCandlas gang, the fight of
+Buckshot Roberts at Blazer's Mill, on the Mescalero Indian reservation,
+is perhaps the most remarkable combat of one man against odds ever known
+in the West. The latter affair is little known, but deserves its record.</p>
+
+<p>Buckshot Roberts was one of those men who appeared on the frontier and
+gave little history of their own past. He came West from Texas, but it
+is thought that he was born farther east than the Lone Star state. He
+was long in the United States army, where he reached the rank of
+sergeant before his discharge; after which he lingered on the frontier,
+<!-- Page 285 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span>as did very many soldiers of that day. He was at one time a member of
+the famous Texas rangers, and had reputation as an Indian fighter. He
+had been badly shot by the Comanches. Again, he was on the other side,
+against the rangers, and once stood off twenty-five of them, although
+nearly killed in this encounter. From these wounds he was so badly
+crippled in his right arm that he could not lift a rifle to his
+shoulder. He was usually known as "Buckshot" Roberts because of the
+nature of his wounds.</p>
+
+<p>Roberts took up a little ranch in the beautiful Ruidoso valley of
+central New Mexico, one of the most charming spots in the world; and all
+he asked was to be let alone, for he seemed able to get along, and not
+afraid of work. When the Lincoln County War broke out, he was recognized
+as a friend of Major Murphy, one of the local faction leaders; but when
+the fighting men curtly told him it was about time for him to choose his
+side, he as curtly replied that he intended to take neither side; that
+he had seen fighting enough in his time, and would fight no man's battle
+for him. This for the time and place was treason, and punishable with
+death. Roberts' friends told him that Billy <!-- Page 286 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span>the Kid and Dick Brewer
+intended to kill him, and advised him to leave the country.</p>
+
+<p>It is said that Roberts had closed out his affairs and was preparing to
+leave the country, when he heard that the gang was looking for him, and
+that he then gave them opportunity to find him. Others say that he went
+up to Blazer's Mill to meet there a friend of his by the name of Kitts,
+who, he heard, had been shot and badly wounded. There is other rumor
+that he went up to Blazer's Mill to have a personal encounter with Major
+Godfroy, with whom there had been some altercation. There is a further
+absurd story that he went for the purpose of killing Billy the Kid, and
+getting the reward which was offered for him. These latter things are
+unlikely. The probable truth is that he, being a brave man, though fully
+determined to leave the country, simply found it written in his creed to
+go up to Blazer's Mill to see his supposedly wounded friend, and also to
+see what there was in the threats which he had heard.</p>
+
+<p>There are living three eye-witnesses of what happened at that time:
+Frank and George Coe, ranchers on the Ruidoso to-day, and Johnnie
+Patten, cook on Carrizzo ranch. Patten was an <!-- Page 287 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span>ex-soldier of H Troop,
+Third Cavalry, and was mustered out at Fort Stanton in 1869. At the time
+of the Roberts fight, he was running the sawmill for Dr. Blazer. Frank
+Coe says that he himself was attempting to act as peacemaker, and that
+he tried to get Roberts to give up his arms and not make any fight.
+Patten says that he himself, at the peril of his life, had warned
+Roberts that Dick Brewer, the Kid, and his gang intended to kill him. It
+is certain that when Roberts came riding up on a mule, still wet from
+the fording of the Tularosa river, he met there Dick Brewer, Billy the
+Kid, George Coe, Frank Coe, Charlie Bowdre, Doc Middleton, one
+Scroggins, and Dirty Steve (Stephen Stevens), with others, to the number
+of thirteen in all. These men still claimed to be a posse, and were
+under Dick Brewer, "special constable."</p>
+
+<p>The Brewer party withdrew to the rear of the house. Frank Coe parleyed
+with Roberts at one side. Kate Godfroy, daughter of Major Godfroy,
+protested at what she knew was the purpose of Brewer and his gang. Dick
+Brewer said to his men, "Don't do anything to him now. Coax him up the
+road a way."</p>
+
+<p>Roberts declined to give up his weapons to <!-- Page 288 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span>Frank Coe. He stood near the
+door, outside the house. Then, as it is told by Johnnie Patten, who saw
+it all, there suddenly came around upon him from behind the house the
+gang of the Kid, all gun fighters, each opening fire as he came. The
+gritty little man gave back not a step toward the open door. Crippled by
+his old wounds so that he could not raise his rifle to his shoulder, he
+worked the lever from his hip. Here were a dozen men, the best fighting
+men of all that wild country, shooting at him at a distance of not a
+dozen feet; yet he shot Jack Middleton through the lungs, though failing
+to kill him. He shot a finger off the hand of George Coe, who then left
+the fight. Roberts then half stepped forward and pushed his gun against
+the stomach of Billy the Kid. For some reason the piece failed to fire,
+and the Kid was saved by the narrowest escape he ever had in his life.
+Charlie Bowdre now appeared around the corner of the house, and Roberts
+fired at him next. His bullet struck Bowdre in the belt, and cut the
+belt off from him. Almost at the same time, Bowdre fired at him and shot
+him through the body. He did not drop, but staggered back against the
+wall; and so he stood there, crippled of old and now wounded to death,
+but so fierce <!-- Page 289 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span>a human tiger that his very looks struck dismay into this
+gang of professional fighters. They actually withdrew around the house
+and left him there!</p>
+
+<p>Each claimed the credit for having shot the victim. "No," said Charlie
+Bowdre, "I shot him myself. I dusted him on both sides. I saw the dust
+fly out on both sides of his coat, where my bullet went clean through
+him." They argued, but they did not go around the house again.</p>
+
+<p>Roberts now staggered back into the house. He threw down his own
+Winchester and picked up a heavy Sharps' rifle which belonged to Dr.
+Appel, and which he found there, in Dr. Blazer's room. Brewer told Dr.
+Blazer to bring Roberts out, but, like a man, Blazer refused. Roberts
+pulled a mattress off the bed to the floor and threw himself down upon
+it near an open window in the front of the house. The gang had
+scattered, surrounding the house. Dick Brewer had taken refuge behind a
+thirty-inch sawlog near the mill, just one hundred and forty steps from
+the window near which this fierce little fighting man was lying, wounded
+to death. Brewer raised his head just above the top of the sawlog, so
+that he could see what <!-- Page 290 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span>Roberts was doing. His eyes were barely visible
+above the top of the log, yet at that distance the heavy bullet from
+Roberts' buffalo gun struck him in the eye and blew off the top of his
+head.</p>
+
+<p>Billy the Kid was now leader of the posse. His first act was to call his
+men together and ride away from the spot, his whole outfit whipped by a
+single man! There was a corpse behind them, and wounded men with them.</p>
+
+<p>Thirty-six hours later there was another corpse at Blazer's Mill. The
+doctor, brought over from Fort Stanton, could do nothing for Roberts,
+and he died in agony. Johnnie Patten, sawyer and rough carpenter, made
+one big coffin, and in this the two, Brewer and Roberts, were buried
+side by side. "I couldn't make a very good coffin," says Patten, "so I
+built it in the shape of a big V, with no end piece at the foot. We just
+put them both in together." And there they lie to-day, grim
+grave-company, according to the report of this eye-witness, who would
+seem to be in a position indicating accuracy. Emil Blazer, a son of Dr.
+Blazer, still lives on the site of this fierce little battle, and he
+says that the two dead men were buried separately, but side by side,
+Brewer to the right of <!-- Page 291 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span>Roberts. The little graveyard holds a few other
+graves, none with headboards or records, and grass now grows above them
+all.</p>
+
+<p>The building where Roberts stood at bay is now gone, and another adobe
+is erected a little farther back from the raceway that once fed the old
+mountain sawmill, but which now is not used as of yore. The old flume
+still exists where the water ran over onto the wheel, and the site of
+the old mill, which is now also torn down, is easily traceable. When the
+author visited the spot in the fall of 1905, all these points were
+verified and the distances measured. It was a long shot that Roberts
+made, and down hill. The vitality of the man who made it, his courage,
+and his tenacity alike of life and of purpose against such odds make
+Roberts a man remembered with admiration even to-day in that once bloody
+region.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page 292 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Chapter_XVIII" id="Chapter_XVIII"></a>Chapter XVIII</h2>
+
+<p>The Man Hunt&mdash;<i>The Western Peace Officer, a Quiet Citizen Who Works for
+a Salary and Risks His Life</i>&mdash;<i>The Trade of Man Hunting</i>&mdash;<i>Biography of
+Pat Garrett, a Typical Frontier Sheriff</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p>The deeds of the Western sheriff have for the most part gone
+unchronicled, or have luridly been set forth in fiction as incidents of
+blood, interesting only because of their bloodiness. The frontier
+officer himself, usually not a man to boast of his own acts, has quietly
+stepped into the background of the past, and has been replaced by others
+who more loudly proclaim their prominence in the advancement of
+civilization. Yet the typical frontier sheriff, the good man who went
+after bad men, and made it safe for men to live and own property and to
+establish homes and to build up a society and a country and a
+government, <!-- Page 293 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span>is a historical character of great interest. Among very
+many good ones, we shall perhaps best get at the type of all by giving
+the story of one; and we shall also learn something of the dangerous
+business of man hunting in a region filled with men who must be hunted
+down.</p>
+
+<p>Patrick Floyd Garrett, better known as Pat Garrett, was a Southerner by
+birth. He was born in Chambers county, Alabama, June 5, 1850. In 1856,
+his parents moved to Claiborne parish, Louisiana, where his father was a
+large landowner, and of course at that time and place, a slave owner,
+and among the bitter opponents of the new <i>r&eacute;gime</i> which followed the
+civil war. When young Garrett's father died, the large estates dwindled
+under bad management; and when within a short time the mother followed
+her husband to the grave, the family resources, affected by the war,
+became involved, although the two Garrett plantations embraced nearly
+three thousand acres of rich Louisiana soil. On January 25, 1869, Pat
+Garrett, a tall and slender youth of eighteen, set out to seek his
+fortunes in the wild West, with no resources but such as lay in his
+brains and body.</p>
+
+<p><!-- Page 294 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span></p><p>He went to Lancaster, in Dallas county, Texas. A big ranch owner in
+southern Texas wanted men, and Pat Garrett packed up and went home with
+him. The world was new to him, however, and he went off with the
+north-bound cows, like many another youngster of the time. His herd was
+made up at Eagle Lake, and he only accompanied the drive as far north as
+Denison. There he began to get uneasy, hearing of the delights of the
+still wilder life of the buffalo hunters on the great plains which lay
+to the west, in the Panhandle of Texas. For three winters, 1875 to 1877,
+he was in and out between the buffalo range and the settlements, by this
+time well wedded to frontier life.</p>
+
+<p>In the fall of 1877, he went West once more, and this time kept on going
+west. With two hardy companions, he pushed on entirely across the wild
+and unknown Panhandle country, leaving the wagons near what was known as
+the "Yellow Houses," and never returning to them. His blankets, personal
+belongings, etc., he never saw again. He and his friends had their heavy
+Sharps' rifles, plenty of powder and lead, and their reloading tools,
+and they had nothing else. Their beds they made of their saddle
+blankets, <!-- Page 295 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>and their food they killed from the wild herds. For their
+love of adventure, they rode on across an unknown country, until finally
+they arrived at the little Mexican settlement of Fort Sumner, on the
+Pecos river, in the month of February, 1878.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 288px;"><a name="i331">
+<img src="images/i331.jpg" width="288" height="400" alt="PAT F. GARRETT
+The most famous peace officer of the Southwest" title="" />
+<span class="caption">PAT F. GARRETT</span></a></div>
+<p class="center">The most famous peace officer of the Southwest</p>
+
+<p>Pat and his friends were hungry, but all the cash they could find was
+just one dollar and a half between them. They gave it to Pat and sent
+him over to the store to see about eating. He asked the price of meals,
+and they told him fifty cents per meal. They would permit them to eat
+but once. He concluded to buy a dollar and a half's worth of flour and
+bacon, which would last for two or three meals. He joined his friends,
+and they went into camp on the river bank, where they cooked and ate,
+perfectly happy and quite careless about the future.</p>
+
+<p>As they finished their breakfast, they saw up the river the dust of a
+cattle herd, and noted that a party were working a herd, cutting out
+cattle for some purpose or other.</p>
+
+<p>"Go up there and get a job," said Pat to one of the boys. The latter did
+go up, but came back reporting that the boss did not want any help.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, he's got to have help," said Pat. So <!-- Page 296 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span>saying, he arose and
+started up stream himself.</p>
+
+<p>Garrett was at that time, as has been said, of very great height, six
+feet four and one-half inches, and very slender. Unable to get trousers
+long enough for his legs, he had pieced down his best pair with about
+three feet of buffalo leggins with the hair out. Gaunt, dusty, and
+unshaven, he looked hard, and when he approached the herd owner and
+asked for work, the other was as much alarmed as pleased. He declined
+again, but Pat firmly told him he had come to go to work, and was sorry,
+but it could not be helped. Something in the quiet voice of Garrett
+seemed to arrest the attention of the cow man. "What can you do,
+Lengthy?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Ride anything with hair, and rope better than any man you've got here,"
+answered Garrett, casting a critical glance at the other men.</p>
+
+<p>The cow man hesitated a moment and then said, "Get in." Pat got in. He
+stayed in. Two years later he was still at Fort Sumner, and married.</p>
+
+<p>Garrett moved down from Fort Sumner soon after his marriage, and settled
+a mile east of what is now the flourishing city of Roswell, at <!-- Page 297 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span>a spring
+on the bank of the Hondo, and in the middle of what was then the virgin
+plains. Here he picked up land, until he had in all more than twelve
+hundred and fifty acres. If he owned it now, he would be worth a half
+million dollars.</p>
+
+<p>He was not, however, to live the steady life of the frontier farmer. His
+friend, Captain J. C. Lea, of Roswell, came to him and asked if he would
+run as sheriff of Lincoln county. Garrett consented and was elected. He
+was warned not to take this office, and word was sent to him by the
+bands of hard-riding outlaws of that region that if he attempted to
+serve any processes on them he would be killed. He paid no attention to
+this, and, as he was still an unknown quantity in the country, which was
+new and thinly settled, he seemed sure to be killed. He won the absolute
+confidence of the governor, who told him to go ahead, not to stand on
+technicalities, but to break up the gang that had been rendering life
+and property unsafe for years and making the territory a mockery of
+civilization. If the truth were known, it might perhaps be found that
+sometimes Garrett arrested a bad man and got his warrant for it later,
+when he went to the settlements. <!-- Page 298 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span>He found a straight six-shooter the
+best sort of warrant, and in effect he took the matter of establishing a
+government in southwestern New Mexico in his own hands, and did it in
+his own way. He was the whole machinery of the law. Sometimes he boarded
+his prisoners out of his own pocket. He himself was the state! His word
+was good, even to the worst cutthroat that ever he captured. Often he
+had in his care prisoners whom, under the law, he could not legally have
+held, had they been demanded of him; but he held them in spite of any
+demand; and the worst prisoner on that border knew that he was safe in
+Pat Garrett's hands, no matter what happened, and that if Pat said he
+would take him through to any given point, he would take him through.</p>
+
+<p>After he had finished his first season of work as sheriff and as United
+States marshal, Garrett ranched it for a time. In 1884, his reputation
+as a criminal-taker being now a wide one, he organized and took charge
+of a company of Texas rangers in Wheeler county, Texas, and made Atacosa
+and thereabouts headquarters for a year and a half. So great became his
+fame now as a man-taker that he was employed to manage the affairs of a
+cattle detective agency; <!-- Page 299 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span>it being now so far along in civilization that
+men were beginning to be careful about their cows. He was offered ten
+thousand dollars to break up a certain band of raiders working in upper
+Texas, and he did it; but he found that he was really being paid to kill
+one or two men, and not to capture them; and, being unwilling to act as
+the agent of any man's revenge, he quit this work and went into the
+employment of the "V" ranch in the White mountains. He then moved down
+to Roswell again, in the spring of 1887. Here he organized the Pecos
+Valley Irrigation Company. He was the first man to suspect the presence
+of artesian water in this country, where the great Spring rivers push up
+from the ground; and through his efforts wells were bored which
+revolutionized all that valley. He ran for sheriff of Chaves county, and
+was defeated. Angry at his first reverse in politics, he pulled up at
+Roswell, and sacrificed his land for what he could get for it. To-day it
+is covered with crops and fruits and worth sixty to one hundred dollars
+an acre.</p>
+
+<p>Garrett now went back to Texas, and settled near Uvalde, where he
+engaged once more in an irrigation enterprise. He was here five <!-- Page 300 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span>years,
+ranching and losing money. W. T. Thornton, the governor of New Mexico,
+sent for him and asked him if he would take the office of sheriff of
+Donna A&ntilde;a county, to fill the unexpired term of Numa Raymond. He was
+elected to serve two subsequent terms as sheriff of Donna A&ntilde;a county,
+and no frontier officer has a better record for bravery.</p>
+
+<p>In the month of December, 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt, who had
+heard of Garrett, met him and liked him, and without any ado or
+consultation appointed him collector of customs at El Paso, Texas. Here
+for the next four years Garrett made a popular collector, and an honest
+and fearless one.</p>
+
+<p>The main reputation gained by Garrett was through his killing the
+desperado, Billy the Kid. It is proper to set down here the chronicle of
+that undertaking, because that will best serve to show the manner in
+which a frontier sheriff gets a bad man.</p>
+
+<p>When the Kid and his gang killed the agency clerk, Bernstein, on the
+Mescalero reservation, they committed a murder on United States
+government ground and an offense against the United States law. A United
+States warrant was placed in the hands of Pat Garrett, <!-- Page 301 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span>then deputy
+United States marshal and sheriff-elect, and he took up the trail,
+locating the men near Fort Sumner, at the ranch of one Brazil, about
+nine miles east of the settlement. With the Kid were Charlie Bowdre, Tom
+O'Folliard, Tom Pickett and Dave Rudabaugh, fellows of like kidney.
+Rudabaugh had just broken jail at Las Vegas, and had killed his jailer.
+Not a man of the band had ever hesitated at murder. They were now eager
+to kill Garrett and kept watch, as best they could, on all his
+movements.</p>
+
+<p>One day Garrett and some of his improvised posse were riding eastward of
+the town when they jumped Tom O'Folliard, who was mounted on a horse
+that proved too good for them in a chase of several miles. Garrett at
+last was left alone following O'Folliard, and fired at him twice. The
+latter later admitted that he fired twenty times at Garrett with his
+Winchester; but it was hard to do good shooting from the saddle at two
+or three hundred yards range, so neither man was hit. O'Folliard did not
+learn his lesson. A few nights later, in company with Tom Pickett, he
+rode into town. Warned of his approach, Garrett with another man was
+waiting, hidden in the <!-- Page 302 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span>shadow of a building. As O'Folliard rode up, he
+was ordered to throw up his hands, but went after his gun instead, and
+on the instant Garrett shot him through the body. "You never heard a man
+scream the way he did," said Garrett. "He dropped his gun when he was
+hit, but we did not know that, and as we ran up to catch his horse, we
+ordered him again to throw up his hands. He said he couldn't, that he
+was killed. We helped him down then, and took him in the house. He died
+about forty-five minutes later. He said it was all his own fault, and
+that he didn't blame anybody. I'd have killed Tom Pickett right there,
+too," concluded Garrett, "but one of my men shot right past my face and
+blinded me for the moment, so Pickett got away."</p>
+
+<p>The remainder of the Kid's gang were now located in the stone house
+above mentioned, and their whereabouts reported by the ranchman whose
+house they had just vacated. The man hunt therefore proceeded
+methodically, and Garrett and his men, of whom he had only two or three
+upon whom he relied as thoroughly game, surrounded the house just before
+dawn. Garrett, with Jim East and Tom Emory, crept up to the head of the
+ravine which made up <!-- Page 303 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span>to the ridge on which the fortress of the
+outlaws stood. The early morning is always the best time for a surprise
+of this sort. It was Charlie Bowdre who first came out in the morning,
+and as he stepped out of the door his career as a bad man ended. Three
+bullets passed through his body. He stepped back into the house, but
+only lived about twenty minutes. The Kid said to him, "Charlie, you're
+killed anyhow. Take your gun and go out and kill that long-legged &mdash;&mdash;
+before you die." He pulled Bowdre's pistol around in front of him and
+pushed him out of the door. Bowdre staggered feebly toward the spot
+where the sheriff was lying. "I wish&mdash;I wish&mdash;&mdash;" he began, and motioned
+toward the house; but he could not tell what it was that he wished. He
+died on Garrett's blankets, which were laid down on the snow.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 265px;"><a name="i341">
+<img src="images/i341.jpg" width="265" height="400" alt="From a painting by John W. Norton
+A TYPICAL WESTERN MAN HUNT Pat F. Garrett chasing Tom O&#39;Folliard" title="" />
+<span class="caption"><span style='font-size:small'>From a painting by John W. Norton</span></span></a></div>
+<p class="center"><b>A TYPICAL WESTERN MAN HUNT</b><br />
+Pat F. Garrett chasing Tom O&#39;Folliard</p>
+
+<p>Previous to this Garrett had killed one horse at the door beam where it
+was tied, and with a remarkable shot had cut the other free, shooting
+off the rope that held it. These two shots he thought about the best he
+ever made; and this is saying much, for he was a phenomenal shot with
+rifle or revolver. There were two horses inside, but the dead horse
+blocked the <!-- Page 304 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span>door. Pickett now told the gang to surrender. "That fellow
+will kill every man that shows outside that door," said he, "that's all
+about it. He's killed O'Folliard, and he's killed Charlie, and he'll
+kill us. Let's surrender and take a chance at getting out again." They
+listened to this, for the shooting they had seen had pretty well broken
+their hearts.</p>
+
+<p>Garrett now sent over to the ranch house for food for his men, and the
+cooking was too much for the hungry outlaws, who had had nothing to eat.
+They put up a dirty white rag on a gun barrel and offered to give up.
+One by one, they came out and were disarmed. That night was spent at the
+Brazil ranch, the prisoners under guard and the body of Charlie Bowdre,
+rolled in its blankets, outside in the wagon. The next morning, Bowdre
+was buried in the little cemetery next to Tom O'Folliard. The Kid did
+not know that he was to make the next in the row.</p>
+
+<p>These men surrendered on condition that they should all be taken through
+to Santa F&eacute;, and Garrett, at the risk of his life, took them through Las
+Vegas, where Rudabaugh was wanted. Half the town surrounded the train in
+the depot yards. Garrett told the Kid that <!-- Page 305 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span>if the mob rushed in the
+door of the car he would toss back a six-shooter to him and ask him to
+help fight.</p>
+
+<p>"All right, Pat," said the Kid, cheerfully. "You and I can whip the
+whole gang of them, and after we've done it I'll go back to my seat and
+you can put the irons on again. You've kept your word." There is little
+doubt that he would have done this, but as it chanced there was no need,
+since at the last moment deputy Malloy, of Las Vegas, jumped on the
+engine and pulled the train out of the yard.</p>
+
+<p>Billy the Kid was tried and condemned to be executed. He had been
+promised pardon by Governor Lew Wallace, but the pardon did not come. A
+few days before the day set for his execution, the Kid, as elsewhere
+described, killed the two deputies who were guarding him, and got back
+once more to his old stamping grounds around Fort Sumner.</p>
+
+<p>"I knew now that I would have to kill the Kid," said Garrett to the
+writer, speaking reminiscently of the bloody scenes as we lately visited
+that country together. "We both knew that it must be one or the other of
+us if we ever met. I followed him up here to Sumner, as you know, with
+two deputies, John Poe and <!-- Page 306 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span>'Tip' McKinney, and I killed him in a room
+up there at the edge of the old cottonwood avenue."</p>
+
+<p>He spoke of events now long gone by. It had been only with difficulty
+that we located the site of the building where the Kid's gang had been
+taken prisoners. The structure itself had been torn down and removed. As
+to the old military post, once a famous one, it offered now nothing
+better than a scene of desolation. There was no longer a single human
+inhabitant there. The old avenue of cottonwoods, once four miles long,
+was now ragged and unwatered, and the great parade ground had gone back
+to sand and sage brush. We were obliged to search for some time before
+we could find the site of the old Maxwell house, in which was ended a
+long and dangerous man hunt of the frontier. Garrett finally located the
+place, now only a rough quadrangle of crumbled earthen walls.</p>
+
+<p>"This is the place," said he, pointing to one corner of the grass-grown
+oblong. "Pete Maxwell's bed was right in this corner of the room, and I
+was sitting in the dark and talking to Pete, who was in bed. The Kid
+passed Poe and McKinney right over there, on what was <!-- Page 307 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span>then the gallery,
+and came through the door right here."</p>
+
+<p>We paused for a time and looked with a certain gravity at this
+wind-swept, desolate spot, around which lay the wide, unwinking desert.
+About us were the ruins of what had been a notable settlement in its
+day, but which now had passed with the old frontier.</p>
+
+<p>"I got word of the Kid up here in much the way I had once before,"
+resumed Garrett at length, "and I followed him, resolved to get him or
+to have him get me. We rode over into the edge of the town and learned
+that the Kid was there, but of course we did not know which house he was
+in. Poe went in to inquire around, as he was not known there like
+myself. He did not know the Kid when he saw him, nor did the Kid know
+him.</p>
+
+<p>"It was a glorious moonlight night; I can remember it perfectly well.
+Poe and McKinney and I all met a little way out from the edge of the
+place. We decided that the Kid was not far away. We went down to the
+houses, and I put Poe and McKinney outside of Pete Maxwell's house and I
+went inside. Right here was the door. We did not know it at that time,
+but just about then the Kid was <!-- Page 308 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span>lying with his boots off in the house
+of an old Mexican just across there, not very far away from Maxwell's
+door. He told the Mexican, when he came in, to cook something for him to
+eat. Maxwell had killed a beef not long before, and there was a quarter
+hanging up under the porch out in front. After a while, the Kid got up,
+got a butcher knife from the old Mexican, and concluded to go over and
+cut himself off a piece of meat from the quarter at Maxwell's house.
+This is how the story arose that he came into the house with his boots
+in his hand to keep an appointment with a Mexican girl.</p>
+
+<p>"The usual story is that I was down close to the wall behind Maxwell's
+bed. This was not the case, for the bed was close against the wall. Pete
+Maxwell was lying in bed, right here in this corner, as I said. I was
+sitting in a chair and leaning over toward him, as I talked in a low
+tone. My right side was toward him, and my revolver was on that side. I
+did not know that the Kid was so close at hand, or, indeed, know for
+sure that he was there in the settlement at all.</p>
+
+<p>"Maxwell did not want to talk very much. He knew the Kid was there, and
+knew his own <!-- Page 309 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span>danger. I was talking to him in Spanish, in a low tone of
+voice, as I say, when the Kid came over here, just as I have told you.
+He saw Poe and McKinney sitting right out there in the moonlight, but
+did not suspect anything. '<i>Quien es?</i>'&mdash;'Who is it?'&mdash;he asked, as he
+passed them. I heard him speak and saw him come backing into the room,
+facing toward Poe and McKinney. He could not see me, as it was dark in
+the room, but he came up to the bed where Maxwell was lying and where I
+was sitting. He seemed to think something might not be quite right. He
+had in his hand his revolver, a self-cocking .41. He could not see my
+face, and he had not heard my voice, or he would have known me.</p>
+
+<p>"The Kid stepped up to the bedside and laid his left hand on the bed and
+bent over Maxwell. He saw me sitting there in the half darkness, but did
+not recognize me, as I was sitting down. My height would have betrayed
+me had I been standing. 'Pete, <i>Quien es</i>?' he asked in a low tone of
+voice; and he half motioned toward me with his six-shooter. That was
+when I looked across into eternity. It wasn't far to go.</p>
+
+<p>"That was exactly how the thing was. I <!-- Page 310 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>gave neither Maxwell nor the Kid
+time for anything farther. There flashed over my mind at once one
+thought, and it was that I had to shoot and shoot at once, and that my
+shot must go to the mark the first time. I knew the Kid would kill me in
+a flash if I did not kill him.</p>
+
+<p>"Just as he spoke and motioned toward me, I dropped over to the left and
+rather down, going after my gun with my right hand as I did so. As I
+fired, the Kid dropped back. I had caught him just about the heart. His
+pistol, already pointed toward me, went off as he fell, but he fired
+high. As I sprang up, I fired once more, but did not hit him, and did
+not need to, for he was dead.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know that he ever knew who it was that killed him. He could not
+see me in the darkness. He may have seen me stoop over and pull. If he
+had had the least suspicion who it was, he would have shot as soon as he
+saw me. When he came to the bed, I knew who he was. The rest happened as
+I have told you. There is no other story about the killing of Billy the
+Kid which is the truth. It is also untrue that his body was ever removed
+from Fort Sumner. It lies there to-day, and I'll show you <!-- Page 311 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span>where we
+buried him. I laid him out myself, in this house here, and I ought to
+know."</p>
+
+<p>Twenty-five years of time had done their work in all that country, as we
+learned when we entered the little barbed-wire enclosure of the cemetery
+where the Kid and his fellows were buried. There are no headstones in
+this cemetery, and no sacristan holds its records. Again Garrett had to
+search in the salt grass and greasewood. "Here is the place," said he,
+at length. "We buried them all in a row. The first grave is the Kid's,
+and next to him is Bowdre, and then O'Folliard."</p>
+
+<p>Here was the sole remaining record of the man hunt's end. So passes the
+glory of the world! In this desolate resting-place, in a wind-swept and
+forgotten graveyard, rests all the remaining fame of certain bad men who
+in their time were bandit kings, who ruled by terror over half a Western
+territory. Even the headboard which once stood at the Kid's grave&mdash;and
+which was once riddled with bullets by cowards who would not have dared
+to shoot that close to him had he been alive&mdash;was gone. It is not likely
+that the graves will be visited again by any one who knows their
+locality. Garrett looked at them in silence for a <!-- Page 312 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span>time, then, turning,
+went to the buckboard for a drink at the canteen. "Well," said he,
+quietly, "here's to the boys, anyway. If there is any other life, I hope
+they'll make better use of it than they did of the one I put them out
+of."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page 313 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Chapter_XIX" id="Chapter_XIX"></a>Chapter XIX</h2>
+
+<p>Bad Men of Texas&mdash;<i>The Lone Star State Always a Producer of
+Fighters</i>&mdash;<i>A Long History of Border War</i>&mdash;<i>The Death of Ben Thompson</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p>A review of the story of the American desperado will show that he has
+always been most numerous at the edge of things, where there was a
+frontier, a debatable ground between civilization and lawlessness, or a
+border between opposing nations or sections. He does not wholly pass
+away with the coming of the law, but his home is essentially in a new
+and undeveloped condition of society. The edge between East and West,
+between North and South, made the territory of the bad man of the
+American interior.</p>
+
+<p>The far Southwest was the oldest of all American frontiers, and the
+stubbornest. We have never, as a nation, been at war with any <!-- Page 314 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span>other
+nation whose territory has adjoined our own except in the case of
+Mexico; and long before we went to war as a people against Mexico, Texas
+had been at war with her as a state, or rather as a population and a
+race against another race. The frontier of the Rio Grande is one of the
+bloodiest of the world, and was such long before Texas was finally
+admitted to the union. There was never any new territory settled by so
+vigorous and belligerent a population as that which first found and
+defended the great empire of the Lone Star. Her early men were, without
+exception, fighters, and she has bred fighters ever since.</p>
+
+<p>The allurement which the unsettled lands of the Southwest had for the
+young men of the early part of the last century lay largely in the
+appeal of excitement and adventure, with a large possibility of worldly
+gain as well. The men of the South who drifted down the old River Road
+across Mississippi and Louisiana were shrewd in their day and
+generation. They knew that eventually Texas would be taken away from
+Mexico, and taken by force. Her vast riches would belong to those who
+had earned them. Men of the South were even then hunting for another
+West, and here was a <!-- Page 315 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span>mighty one. The call came back that the fighting
+was good all along the line; and the fighting men of all the South, from
+Virginia to Louisiana, fathers and sons of the boldest and bravest of
+Southern families, pressed on and out to take a hand. They were
+scattered and far from numerous when they united and demanded a
+government of their own, independent of the far-off and inefficient head
+of the Mexican law. They did not want Coahuila as their country, but
+Texas, and asked a government of their own. Lawless as they were, they
+wanted a real law, a law of Saxon right and justice.</p>
+
+<p>Men like Crockett, Fannin, Travers and Bowie were influenced half by
+political ambition and half by love of adventure when they moved across
+the plains of eastern Texas and took up their abode on the firing line
+of the Mexican border. If you seek a historic band of bad men, fighting
+men of the bitterest Baresark type, look at the immortal defenders of
+the Alamo. Some of them were, in the light of calm analysis, little
+better than guerrillas; but every man was a hero. They all had a chance
+to escape, to go out and join Sam Houston farther to the east; but they
+refused to a man, and, plying the border weapons as none but <!-- Page 316 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span>such as
+themselves might, they died, full of the glory of battle; not in ranks
+and shoulder to shoulder, with banners and music to cheer them, but each
+for himself and hand to hand with his enemy, a desperate fighting man.</p>
+
+<p>The early men of Texas for generations fought Mexicans and Indians in
+turn. The country was too vast for any system of law. Each man had
+learned to depend upon himself. Each cabin kept a rifle and pistol for
+each male old enough to bear them, and each boy, as he grew up, was
+skilled in weapons and used to the thought that the only arbitrament
+among men was that of weapons. Part of the population, appreciating the
+exemptions here to be found, was, without doubt, criminal; made up of
+men who had fled, for reasons of their own, from older regions. These in
+time required the attention of the law; and the armed bodies of
+hard-riding Texas rangers, a remedy born of necessity, appeared as the
+executives of the law.</p>
+
+<p>The cattle days saw the wild times of the border prolonged. The buffalo
+range caught its quota of hard riders and hard shooters. And always the
+apparently exhaustless empires of new and unsettled lands&mdash;an enormous,
+untracked empire of the wild&mdash;beckoned on and <!-- Page 317 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span>on; so that men in the
+most densely settled sections were very far apart, and so that the law
+as a guardian could not be depended upon. It was not to be wondered at
+that the name of Texas became the synonym for savagery. That was for a
+long time the wildest region within our national confines. Many men who
+attained fame as fighters along the Pecos and Rio Grande and Gila and
+Colorado came across the borders from Texas. Others slipped north into
+the Indian Nations, and left their mark there. Some went to the mines of
+the Rockies, or the cattle ranges from Montana to Arizona. Many stayed
+at home, and finished their eventful lives there in the usual
+fashion&mdash;killing now and again, then oftener, until at length they
+killed once too often and got hanged; or not often enough once, and so
+got shot.</p>
+
+<p>To undertake to give even the most superficial study to a field so vast
+as this would require a dozen times the space we may afford, and would
+lead us far into matters of history other than those intended. We can
+only point out that the men of the Lone Star state left their stamp as
+horsemen and weapon-bearers clear on to the north, and as far as the
+foot of the Arctic circle. Their language and their methods <!-- Page 318 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span>mark the
+entire cattle business of the plains from the Rio Grande to the
+Selkirks. Theirs was a great school for frontiersmen, and its graduates
+gave full account of themselves wherever they went. Among them were bad
+men, as bad as the worst of any land, and in numbers not capable of
+compass even in a broad estimate.</p>
+
+<p>Some citizens of Montgomery county, Texas, were not long ago sitting in
+a store of an evening, and they fell to counting up the homicides which
+had fallen under their notice in that county within recent memory. They
+counted up seventy-five authenticated cases, and could not claim
+comprehensiveness for their tally. Many a county of Texas could do as
+well or better, and there are many counties. It takes you two days to
+ride across Texas by railway. A review of the bad man field of Texas
+pauses for obvious reasons!</p>
+
+<p>So many bad men of Texas have attained reputation far wider than their
+state that it became a proverb upon the frontier that any man born on
+Texas soil would shoot, just as any horse born there would "buck." There
+is truth back of most proverbs, although to-day both horses and men of
+Texas are losing something <!-- Page 319 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span>of their erstwhile bronco character. That
+out of such conditions, out of this hardy and indomitable population,
+the great state could bring order and quiet so soon and so permanently
+over vast unsettled regions, is proof alike of the fundamental sternness
+and justness of the American character and the value of the American
+fighting man.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, though peace hath her victories not less than war, it is to be
+doubted whether in her own heart Texas is more proud of her statesmen
+and commercial kings than of her stalwart fighting men, bred to the use
+of arms. The beautiful city of San Antonio is to-day busy and
+prosperous; yet to-day you tread there ground which has been stained red
+over and over again. The names of Crockett, Milam, Travis, Bowie, endure
+where those of captains of industry are forgotten. Out of history such
+as this, covering a half century of border fighting, of frontier travel
+and merchandising, of cattle trade and railroad building, it is
+impossible&mdash;in view of the many competitors of equal claims&mdash;to select
+an example of bad eminence fit to bear the title of the leading bad man
+of Texas.</p>
+
+<p>There was one somewhat noted Texas character, <!-- Page 320 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span>however, whose life comes
+down to modern times, and hence is susceptible of fairly accurate
+review&mdash;a thing always desirable, though not often practical, for no
+history is more distorted, not to say more garbled, than that dealing
+with the somewhat mythical exploits of noted gun fighters. Ben Thompson,
+of Austin, killer of more than twenty men, and a very perfect exemplar
+of the creed of the six-shooter, will serve as instance good enough for
+a generic application. Thompson was not a hero. He did no deeds of war.
+He led no forlorn hope into the imminent deadly breach. His name is
+preserved in no history of his great commonwealth. He was in the opinion
+of certain peace officers, all that a citizen should not be. Yet in his
+way he reached distinction; and so striking was his life that even
+to-day he does not lack apologists, even as he never lacked friends.</p>
+
+<p>Ben Thompson was of English descent, and was born near Lockhart, Texas,
+according to general belief, though it is stated that he was born in
+Yorkshire, England. Later his home was in Austin, where he spent the
+greater part of his life, though roaming from place to place. Known as a
+bold and skillful gun man, he was looked on as good material for a
+hunter of bad <!-- Page 321 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span>men, and at the time of his death was marshal of police
+at Austin. In personal appearance Thompson looked the part of the
+typical gambler and gun fighter. His height was about five feet eight
+inches, and his figure was muscular and compact. His hair was dark and
+waving; his eyes gray. He was very neat in dress, and always took
+particular pains with his footwear, his small feet being always clad in
+well-fitting boots of light material, a common form of foppery in a land
+where other details of dress were apt to be carelessly regarded. He wore
+a dark mustache which, in his early years, he was wont to keep waxed to
+points. In speech he was quiet and unobtrusive, unless excited by drink.
+With the six-shooter he was a peerless shot, an absolute genius, none in
+all his wide surrounding claiming to be his superior; and he had a
+ferocity of disposition which grew with years until he had, as one of
+his friends put it, "a craving to kill people." Each killing seemed to
+make him desirous of another. He thus came to exercise that curious
+fascination which such characters have always commanded. Fear he did not
+know, or at least no test arising in his somewhat varied life ever
+caused him to show fear. He passed through life as a wild <!-- Page 322 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span>animal,
+ungoverned by the law, rejoicing in blood; yet withal he was held as a
+faithful friend and a good companion. To this day many men repel the
+accusation that he was bad, and maintain that each of his twenty
+killings was done in self-defense. The brutal phase of his nature was no
+doubt dominant, even although it was not always in evidence. He was
+usually spoken of as a "good fellow," and those who palliate or deny
+most of his wild deeds declare that local history has never been as fair
+to him as he deserved.</p>
+
+<p>Thompson's first killing was while he was a young man at New Orleans,
+and according to the story, arose out of his notions of chivalry. He was
+passing down the street in a public conveyance, in company of several
+young Creoles, who were going home from a dance in a somewhat
+exhilarated condition. One or two of the strangers made remarks to an
+unescorted girl, which Thompson construed to be offensive, and he took
+it upon himself to avenge the insult to womanhood. In the affray that
+followed he killed one of the young men. For this he was obliged to flee
+to old Mexico, taking one of the boats down the river. He returned
+presently to Galveston, where he set up as a gambler, <!-- Page 323 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span>and began to
+extend his reputation as a fighting man. Most of his encounters were
+over cards or drink or women, the history of many or most of the border
+killings.</p>
+
+<p>Thompson's list grew steadily, and by the time he was forty years of age
+he had a reputation far wider than his state. In all the main cities of
+Texas he was a figure more or less familiar, and always dreaded. His
+skill with his favorite weapon was a proverb in a state full of men
+skilled with weapons. Moreover, his disposition now began to grow more
+ugly, sullen and bloodthirsty. He needed small pretext to kill a man if,
+for the slightest cause, he took a dislike to him. To illustrate the
+ferocity of the man, and his readiness to provoke a quarrel, the
+following story is told of him:</p>
+
+<p>A gambler by the name of Jim Burdette was badly whipped by the
+proprietor of a variety show, Mark Wilson, who, after the fight, told
+Burdette that he had enough of men like him, who only came to his
+theater to raise trouble and interfere with his business, and that if
+either he or any of his gang ever again attempted to disturb his
+audiences that they would have him (Wilson) to deal with. The next day
+Ben Thompson, seated in a barber shop, <!-- Page 324 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span>heard about the row and said to
+a negro standing by: "Mack, d&mdash;n your nigger soul, you go down to that
+place this evening and when the house is full and everybody is seated,
+you just raise hell and we'll see what that &mdash;&mdash; is made of." The
+program was carried out. The negro arose in the midst of the audience
+and delivered himself of a few blood-curdling yells. Instantly the
+proprietor came out of the place, but caught sight of Thompson, who had
+drawn a pair of guns and stood ready to kill Wilson. The latter was too
+quick for him, and quickly disappeared behind the scenery, after his
+shotgun. There was too much excitement that night, and the matter passed
+off without a killing. A few nights thereafter, Thompson procured some
+lamp-black, which he gave the gambler Burdette, with instructions to go
+to the theater, watch his chance, and dash the stuff in Wilson's face.
+This was done and when the ill-fated proprietor, who immediately went
+for his shotgun, came out with that weapon, Thompson fell to the ground,
+and the contents of the gun, badly fired at the hands of Wilson, his
+face full of lamp-black, passed over Thompson's head. Thompson then
+arose and filled Wilson full of holes, killing him instantly. <!-- Page 325 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span>The
+bartender, seeing his employer's life in danger, fired at Thompson
+wildly, and as Thompson turned on him he dodged behind the bar to
+receive his death wound through the counter and in his back. Thompson at
+the court of last resort managed to have a lot of testimony brought to
+bear, and, with a half dozen gamblers to swear to anything he needed, he
+was admitted to bail and later freed.</p>
+
+<p>He is said to have killed these two men for no reason in the world
+except to show that he could "run" a place where others had failed. A
+variation of the story is that a saloon keeper fired at Thompson as he
+was walking down the street in Austin, and missing him, sprang back
+behind the bar, Thompson shooting him through the head, through the bar
+front. Another man's life now meant little to him. He desired to be
+king, to be "chief," just as the leaders of the desperadoes in the
+mining regions of California and Montana sought to be "chief." It meant
+recognition of their courage, their skill, their willingness to take
+human life easily and carelessly and quickly, a singular ambition which
+has been so evidenced in no other part of the world than the American
+West. It is certain that the worst bad men all over <!-- Page 326 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span>Texas were afraid
+of Ben Thompson. He was "chief."</p>
+
+<p>Ben Thompson left the staid paths of life in civilized communities. He
+did not rob, and he did not commit theft or burglary or any highway
+crimes; yet toiling and spinning were not for him. He was, for the most
+part, a gambler, and after a while he ceased even to follow that calling
+as a means of livelihood. Forgetting the etiquette of his chosen
+profession, he insisted on winning no manner how and no matter what the
+game. He would go into a gambling resort in some town, and sit in at a
+game. If he won, very well. If he lost, he would become enraged, and
+usually ended by reaching out and raking in the money on the table, no
+matter what the decision of the cards. He bought drinks for the crowd
+with the money he thus took, and scattered it right and left, so that
+his acts found a certain sanction among those who had not been
+despoiled.</p>
+
+<p>To know what nerve it required to perform these acts of audacity, one
+must know something of the frontier life, which at no corner of the
+world was wilder and touchier than in the very part of the country where
+Thompson held forth. There were hundreds of men quick <!-- Page 327 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span>with the gun all
+about him, men of nerve, but he did not hesitate to take all manner of
+chances in that sort of population. The madness of the bad man was upon
+him. He must have known what alone could be his fate at last, but he
+went on, defying and courting his own destruction, as the finished
+desperado always does, under the strange creed of self-reliance which he
+established as his code of life. Thus, at a banquet of stockmen in
+Austin, and while the dinner was in progress, Thompson, alone, stampeded
+every man of them, and at that time nearly all stockmen were game. The
+fear of Thompson's pistol was such that no one would stand for a fight
+with him. Once Thompson went to the worst place in Texas, the town of
+Luling, where Rowdy Joe was running the toughest dance house in America.
+He ran all the bad men out of the place, confiscated what cash he needed
+from the gaming tables and raised trouble generally. He showed that he
+was "chief."</p>
+
+<p>In the early eighties, in the quiet, sleepy, bloody old town of San
+Antonio, there was a dance hall, gambling resort and vaudeville theater,
+in which the main proprietor was one Jack Harris, commonly known as
+Pegleg Harris. <!-- Page 328 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span>Thompson frequently patronized this place on his visits
+to San Antonio, and received treatment which left him with a grudge
+against Harris, whom he resolved to kill. He followed his man into the
+bar-room one day and killed Harris as he stood in the semi-darkness. It
+was only another case of "self-defense" for Thompson, who was well used
+to being cleared of criminal charges or left unaccused altogether; and
+no doubt Harris would have killed him if he could.</p>
+
+<p>After killing Harris, Thompson declared that he proposed to kill Harris'
+partners, Foster and Simms. He had an especial grudge against Billy
+Simms, then a young man not yet nineteen years of age, because, so it is
+stated, he fancied that Simms supplanted him in the affections of a
+woman in Austin; and he carried also his grudge against the gambling
+house, where Simms now was the manager. Every time Thompson got drunk,
+he declared his intention of killing Billy Simms, and as the latter was
+young and inexperienced, he trembled in his boots at this talk which
+seemed surely to spell his doom. Simms, to escape Thompson's wrath,
+removed to Chicago, and remained there for a time, but before long was
+summoned home to Austin, where his mother was very ill. <!-- Page 329 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span>Thompson knew
+of his presence in Austin, but with magnanimity declined to kill Simms
+while he was visiting his sick mother. "Wait till he goes over to
+Santone," he said, "then I'll step over and kill the little &mdash;&mdash;."
+Simms, presently called to San Antonio to settle some debt of Jack
+Harris' estate, of which as friend and partner of the widow he had been
+appointed administrator, went to the latter city with a heavy heart,
+supposing that he would never leave it alive. He was told there that
+Thompson had been threatening him many times; and Simms received many
+telegrams to that effect. Some say that Thompson himself telegraphed
+Simms that he was coming down that day to kill him. Certainly a friend
+of Simms on the same day wired him warning: "Party who wants to destroy
+you on train this day bound for San Antonio."</p>
+
+<p>Friends of Thompson deny that he made such threats, and insist that he
+went to San Antonio on a wholly peaceful errand. In any case, this
+guarded but perfectly plain message set Simms half distracted. He went
+to the city marshal and showed his telegram, asking the marshal for
+protection, but the latter told him nothing could be done until Thompson
+had <!-- Page 330 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span>committed some "overt act." The sheriff and all the other officers
+said the same thing, not caring to meet Thompson if they could avoid it.
+Simms later in telling his story would sob at the memory of his feeling
+of helplessness at that time. The law gave him no protection. He was
+obliged to take matters in his own hands. He went to a judge of the
+court, and asked him what he should do. The judge pondered for a time,
+and said: "Under the circumstances, I should advise a shotgun."</p>
+
+<p>Simms went to one of the faro dealers of the house, a man who was known
+as bad, and who never sat down to deal faro without a brace of big
+revolvers on the table; but this dealer advised him to go and "make
+friends with Thompson." He went to Foster, Harris' old partner, and laid
+the matter before him. Foster said, slowly, "Well, Billy, when he comes
+we'll do the best we can." Simms thought that he too was weakening.</p>
+
+<p>There was a big policeman, a Mexican by name of Coy, who was considered
+a brave man and a fighter, and Simms now went to him and asked for aid,
+saying that he expected trouble that night, and wanted Coy to do his
+duty. Coy did not become enthusiastic, though as a matter <!-- Page 331 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span>of fact
+neither he nor Foster made any attempt to leave the place. Simms turned
+away, feeling that his end was near. In desperation he got a shotgun,
+and for a time stationed himself near the top of the stair up which
+Thompson would probably come when entering the place. The theater was up
+one flight of stairs, and at the right was the customary bar, from which
+"ladies" in short skirts served drinks to the crowd during the variety
+performance, which was one of the attractions of the place.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"><a name="i371">
+<img src="images/i371.jpg" class="jpg" width="600" height="348" alt="THE OLD CHISUM RANCH BELOW ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE OLD CHISUM RANCH BELOW ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO</span>
+</a></div>
+
+<p>It was nervous work, waiting for the killer to come, and Simms could not
+stand it. He walked down the stairway, and took a turn around the block
+before he again ascended the stairs to the hall. Meantime, Ben Thompson,
+accompanied by another character, King Fisher, a man with several
+notches on his gun, had ascended the stairs, and had taken a seat on the
+right hand side and beyond the bar, in the row nearest the door. When
+Simms stepped to the foot of the stairs on his return, he met the
+barkeeper, who was livid with terror. He pointed trembling up the stair
+and whispered, "He's there!" Ben Thompson and King Fisher had as yet
+made no sort of demonstration. It is said that King Fisher had decoyed
+Thompson <!-- Page 332 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span>into the theater, knowing that a trap was laid to kill him. It
+is also declared that Thompson went in merely for amusement. A friend of
+the author, a New Mexican sheriff who happened to be in San Antonio, saw
+and talked with both men that afternoon. They were both quiet and sober
+then.</p>
+
+<p>Simms' heart was in his mouth, but he made up his mind to die game, if
+he had to die. Slowly he walked up the stairway. Such was Thompson's
+vigilance, that he quickly arose and advanced toward Simms, who stood at
+the top of the stairs petrified and unable to move a muscle. Before
+Simms could think, his partner, Foster, appeared on the scene, and as he
+stood up, Thompson saw him and walked toward him and said: "Hello,
+Foster, how are you?" Slowly and deliberately Foster spoke: "Ben, this
+world is not big enough for us both. You killed poor Jack Harris like a
+dog, and you didn't as much as give him a chance for his life. You and I
+can never be friends any more." Quick as a flash and with a face like a
+demon, Thompson drew his pistol and jammed it into Foster's mouth,
+cruelly tearing his lips and sending him reeling backward. While this
+was going on, Simms had retreated <!-- Page 333 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span>to the next step, and there drew his
+pistol, not having his shotgun in hand then. He stepped forward as he
+saw Foster reel from the blow Thompson gave him, and with sudden courage
+opened fire. His first shot must have taken effect, and perhaps it
+decided the conflict. Thompson's gun did not get into action. Simms kept
+on firing. Thompson reeled back against King Fisher, and the two were
+unable to fire. Meantime the big Mexican, Coy, showed up from somewhere,
+just as Foster had. Both Foster and Coy rushed in front of the line of
+fire of Simms' pistol; and then without doubt, Simms killed his own
+friend and preserver. Foster got his death wound in such position that
+Simms admitted he must have shot him. None the less Foster ran into
+Thompson as the latter reeled backwards upon Fisher, and, with the fury
+of a tiger, shoved his own pistol barrel into Thompson's mouth in turn,
+and fired twice, completing the work Simms had begun. The giant Coy
+hurled his bulk into the struggling mass now crowded into the corner of
+the room, and some say he held Ben Thompson's arms, though in the m&ecirc;l&eacute;e
+it was hard to tell what happened. He called out to Simms, "Don't mind
+me," meaning that Simms should keep on <!-- Page 334 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span>firing. "Kill the &mdash;&mdash; of &mdash;&mdash;!"
+he cried. Coy no doubt was a factor in saving Simms' life, for one or
+the other of these two worst men in the Southwest would have got a man
+before he fell, had he been able to get his hands free in the
+struggling. Coy was shot in the leg, possibly by Simms, but did not
+drop. Simms took care of Coy to the end of his life, Coy dying but
+recently.</p>
+
+<p>One of the men engaged in this desperate fight says that Coy did not
+hold Thompson, and that at first no one was shot to the floor. Thompson
+was staggered by Simms' first shot, which prevented a quick return of
+fire. It was Foster who killed Thompson and very likely King Fisher, the
+latter being hemmed in in the corner with Thompson in front of him. Coy
+rushed into the two and handled them so roughly that they never got
+their guns into action so far as known.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving the fallen men at the rear of the theater, Simms now went down
+stairs, carrying Foster's pistol, with two chambers empty (the shots
+that killed Thompson) and his own gun. He saw Thompson's brother Bill
+coming at him. He raised the gun to kill him, when Phil Shardein, then
+city marshal, jumped on Thompson <!-- Page 335 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span>and shielded him with his body,
+calling out, "Don't shoot, Billy, I've got him." This saved Bill
+Thompson's life. Then several shots were heard upstairs, and upon
+investigation, it was found that Coy had emptied his pistol into the
+dead body of Thompson. He also shot Fisher, to "make sure the &mdash;&mdash; were
+dead."</p>
+
+<p>Thus they died at last, two of the most notorious men of Texas, both
+with their boots on. There were no tears. Many told what they would or
+could have done had Ben Thompson threatened them. This closing act in
+the career of Ben Thompson came in the late spring of 1882. He was then
+about forty-three years of age.</p>
+
+<p>King Fisher, who met death at the same time with Thompson, was a good
+disciple of desperadoism. He was a dark-haired, slender young man from
+Goliad county&mdash;which county seems to have produced far more than its
+share of bad men. He had killed six men and stolen a great many horses
+in his time. Had he lived longer, he would have killed more. He was not
+of the caliber sufficient to undertake the running of a large city, but
+there was much relief felt over his death. He had many friends, of
+<!-- Page 336 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span>course, and some of these deny that he had any intention of making
+trouble when he went into the theater with Ben Thompson, just as friends
+of the latter accuse King Fisher of treachery. There are never lacking
+men who regard dead desperadoes as martyrs; and indeed it is usually the
+case that there are mixed circumstances and frequently extenuating ones,
+to be found in the history of any killer's life.</p>
+
+<p>Another Goliad county man well known around San Antonio was Alfred Y.
+Allee, who was a rancher a short distance back from the railway. Allee
+was decent when sober, but when drunk was very dangerous, and was
+recognized as bad and well worth watching. Liquor seemed to transform
+him and to make him a bloodthirsty fiend. He had killed several men, one
+or two under no provocation whatever and when they were defenseless,
+including a porter on a railway train. It was his habit to come to town
+and get drunk, then to invite every one to drink with him and take
+offense at any refusal. He liked to be "chief" of the drinking place
+which he honored with his presence. He once ordered a peaceful citizen
+of San Antonio, a friend of the writer, up to drink with him, and when
+the latter declined came <!-- Page 337 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span>near shooting him. The man took his drink,
+then slipped away and got his shotgun. Perhaps his second thought was
+wiser. "What's the use?" he argued with himself. "Somebody'll kill Allee
+before long anyhow."</p>
+
+<p>This came quite true, for within the week Allee had run his course. He
+dropped down to Laredo and began to "hurrah" that town also. The town
+marshal, Joe Bartelow, was a Mexican, but something of a killer himself,
+and he resolved to end the Allee disturbances, once for all. It is said
+that Allee was not armed when at length they met in a saloon, and it is
+said that Bartelow offered his hand in greeting. At once Bartelow threw
+his arm around Allee's neck, and with his free hand cut him to death
+with a knife. Whether justifiable or not, that was the fashion of the
+homicide.</p>
+
+<p>Any man who has killed more than twenty men is in most countries
+considered fit to qualify as bad. This test would include the little
+human tiger, Tumlinson, of South Texas, who was part of the time an
+officer of the law and part of the time an independent killer in Texas.
+He had many more than twenty men to his credit, it was said, and his
+Mexican wife, smilingly, always said that "Tumlinson never counted
+<!-- Page 338 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span>Mexicans." He was a genius with the revolver, and as good a rifle shot
+as would often be found. It made no difference to him whether or not a
+man was running, for part of his pistol practice was in shooting at a
+bottle swinging in the wind from the bough of a tree. Legend goes that
+Tumlinson killed his wife and then shot himself dead, taking many
+secrets with him. He was bad.</p>
+
+<p>Sam Bass was a noted outlaw and killer in West Texas, accustomed to ride
+into town and to take charge of things when he pleased. He had many
+thefts and robberies to his credit, and not a few murders. His finish
+was one not infrequent in that country. The citizens got wind of his
+coming one day, just before he rode into Round Rock for a little raid.
+The city marshal and several others opened fire on Bass and his party,
+and killed them to a man.</p>
+
+<p>It was of such stuff as this that most of the bad men and indeed many of
+the peace officers were composed, along a wide frontier in the early
+troublous days following the civil war, when all the border was a
+seething mass of armed men for whom the law had as yet gained no
+meaning. To tell the story of more individuals would be to depart from
+the purpose <!-- Page 339 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span>of this work. Were these men wrong, and were they wholly
+and unreservedly bad? Ignorance and bigotry will be the first to give
+the answer, the first to apply to them the standards of these later
+days.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page 340 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Chapter_XX" id="Chapter_XX"></a>Chapter XX</h2>
+
+<p>Modern Bad Men&mdash;<i>Murder and Robbery as a Profession</i>&mdash;<i>The School of
+Guerrilla Warfare</i>&mdash;<i>Butcher Quantrell; the James Brothers; the Younger
+Brothers</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p>Outlawry of the early border, in days before any pretense at
+establishment of a system of law and government, and before the holding
+of property had assumed any very stable form, may have retained a
+certain glamour of romance. The loose gold of the mountains, the loose
+cattle of the plains, before society had fallen into any strict way of
+living, and while plenty seemed to exist for any and all, made a
+temptation easily accepted and easily excused. The ruffians of those
+early days had a largeness in their methods which gives some of them at
+least a color of interest. If any excuse may be offered for lawlessness,
+any palliation for acts committed <!-- Page 341 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span>without countenance of the law, that
+excuse and palliation may be pleaded for these men if for any. But for
+the man who is bad and mean as well, who kills for gain, and who adds
+cruelty and cunning to his acts instead of boldness and courage, little
+can be said. Such characters afford us horror, but it is horror
+unmingled with any manner of admiration.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, if we reconcile ourselves to tarry a moment with the cheap and
+gruesome, the brutal and ignorant side of mere crime, we shall be
+obliged to take into consideration some of the bloodiest characters ever
+known in our history; who operated well within the day of established
+law; who made a trade of robbery, and whose capital consisted of
+disregard for the life and property of others. That men like this should
+live for years at the very door of large cities, in an old settled
+country, and known familiarly in their actual character to thousands of
+good citizens, is a strange commentary on the American character; yet
+such are the facts.</p>
+
+<p>It has been shown that a widely extended war always has the effect of
+cheapening human life in and out of the ranks of the fighting armies.
+The early wars of England, in the days of the longbow and buckler,
+brought on her palmiest <!-- Page 342 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span>days of cutpurses and cutthroats. The days
+following our own civil war were fearful ones for the entire country
+from Montana to Texas; and nowhere more so than along the dividing line
+between North and South, where feeling far bitterer than soldierly
+antagonism marked a large population on both sides of that contest. We
+may further restrict the field by saying that nowhere on any border was
+animosity so fierce as in western Missouri and eastern Kansas, where
+jayhawker and border ruffian waged a guerrilla war for years before the
+nation was arrayed against itself in ordered ranks. If mere blood be
+matter of our record here, assuredly, is a field of interest. The deeds
+of Lane and Brown, of Quantrell and Hamilton, are not surpassed in
+terror in the history of any land. Osceola, Marais du Cygne,
+Lawrence&mdash;these names warrant a shudder even to-day.</p>
+
+<p>This locality&mdash;say that part of Kansas and Missouri near the towns of
+Independence and Westport, and more especially the counties of Jackson
+and Clay in the latter state&mdash;was always turbulent, and had reason to
+be. Here was the halting place of the westbound civilization, at the
+edge of the plains, at the line long dividing the whites from the
+Indians. <!-- Page 343 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span>Here settled, like the gravel along the cleats of a sluice,
+the daring men who had pushed west from Kentucky, Tennessee, lower Ohio,
+eastern Missouri&mdash;the Boones, Carsons, Crocketts, and Kentons of their
+day. Here came the Mormons to found their towns, and later to meet the
+armed resistance which drove them across the plains. Here, at these very
+towns, was the outfitting place and departing point of the caravans of
+the early Santa F&eacute; trade; here the Oregon Trail left for the far
+Northwest; and here the Forty-niners paused a moment in their mad rush
+to the golden coast of the Pacific. Here, too, adding the bitterness of
+fanaticism to the courage of the frontier, came the bold men of the
+North who insisted that Kansas should be free for the expansion of the
+northern population and institutions.</p>
+
+<p>This corner of Missouri-Kansas was a focus of recklessness and daring
+for more than a whole generation. The children born there had an
+inheritance of indifference to death such as has been surpassed nowhere
+in our frontier unless that were in the bloody Southwest. The men of
+this country, at the outbreak of the civil war, made as high an average
+in desperate fighting as any that ever lived. Too restless to <!-- Page 344 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span>fight
+under the ensign of any but their own ilk, they set up a banner of their
+own. The black flags of Quantrell and of Lane, of border ruffian and
+jayhawker, were guidons under which quarter was unknown, and mercy a
+forgotten thing. Warfare became murder, and murder became assassination.
+Ambushing, surprise, pillage and arson went with murder; and women and
+children were killed as well as fighting men. Is it wonder that in such
+a school there grew up those figures which a certain class of writers
+have been wont to call bandit kings; the bank robbers and train robbers
+of modern days, the James and Younger type of bad men?</p>
+
+<p>The most notorious of these border fighters was the bloody leader,
+Charles William Quantrell, leader at the sacking of Lawrence, and as
+dangerous a partisan leader as ever threw leg into saddle. He was born
+in Hagerstown, Maryland, July 20, 1836, and as a boy lived for a time in
+the Ohio city of Cleveland. At twenty years of age, he joined his
+brother for a trip to California, <i>via</i> the great plains. This was in
+1856, and Kansas was full of Free Soilers, whose political principles
+were not always untempered by a large-minded willingness to <!-- Page 345 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span>rob. A
+party of these men surprised the Quantrell party on the Cottonwood
+river, and killed the older brother. Charles William Quantrell swore an
+undying revenge; and he kept his oath.</p>
+
+<p>It is not necessary to mention in detail the deeds of this border
+leader. They might have had commendation for their daring had it not
+been for their brutality and treachery. Quantrell had a band of sworn
+men, held under solemn oath to stand by each other and to keep their
+secrets. These men were well armed and well mounted, were all fearless
+and all good shots, the revolver being their especial arm, as it was of
+Mosby's men in the civil war. The tactics of this force comprised
+surprise, ambush, and a determined rush, in turn; and time and again
+they defeated Federal forces many times their number, being thoroughly
+well acquainted with the country, and scrupling at nothing in the way of
+treachery, just as they considered little the odds against which they
+fought. Their victims were sometimes paroled, but not often, and a
+massacre usually followed a defeat&mdash;almost invariably so if the number
+of prisoners was small.</p>
+
+<p>Cold-blooded and unhesitating murder was <!-- Page 346 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span>part of their everyday life.
+Thus Jesse James, on the march to the Lawrence massacre, had in charge
+three men, one of them an old man, whom they took along as guides from
+the little town of Aubrey, Kansas. They used these men until they found
+themselves within a few miles of Lawrence, and then, as is alleged,
+members of the band took them aside and killed them, the old man begging
+for his life and pleading that he never had done them any wrong. His
+murderers were no more than boys. This act may have been that of bad
+men, but not of the sort of bad men that leaves us any sort of respect,
+such as that which may be given Wild Bill, even Billy the Kid, or any of
+a dozen other big-minded desperadoes.</p>
+
+<p>This assassination was but one of scores or hundreds. A neighbor
+suspected of Federal sympathies was visited in the night and shot or
+hanged, his property destroyed, his family killed. The climax of the
+Lawrence massacre was simply the working out of principles of blood and
+revenge. In that fight, or, more properly, that massacre, women and
+children went down as well as men. The James boys were Quantrell riders,
+Jesse a new recruit, and that day they maintained that they had killed
+<!-- Page 347 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span>sixty-five persons between them, and wounded twenty more! What was the
+total record of these two men alone in all this period of guerrilla
+fighting? It cannot be told. Probably they themselves could not
+remember. The four Younger boys had records almost or quite as bad.</p>
+
+<p>There, indeed, was a border soaked in blood, a country torn with
+intestinal warfare. Quantrell was beaten now and then, meeting fighting
+men in blue or in jeans, as well as leading fighting men; and at times
+he was forced to disband his men, later to recruit again, and to go on
+with his marauding up and down the border. His career attracted the
+attention of leaders on both sides of the opposing armies, and at one
+time it was nearly planned that Confederates should join the Unionists
+and make common cause against these guerrillas, who had made the name of
+Missouri one of reproach and contempt. The matter finally adjusted
+itself by the death of Quantrell in a fight at Smiley, Kentucky, in
+January, 1865.</p>
+
+<p>With a birth and training such as this, what could be expected for the
+surviving Quantrell men? They scattered over all the frontier, from
+Texas to Minnesota, and most of them <!-- Page 348 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span>lived in terror of their lives
+thereafter, with the name of Quantrell as a term of loathing attached to
+them where their earlier record was known. Many and many a border
+killing years later and far removed in locality arose from the
+implacable hatred descended from those days.</p>
+
+<p>As for the James boys, the Younger boys, what could they do? The days of
+war were gone. There were no longer any armed banners arrayed one
+against the other. The soldiers who had fought bravely and openly on
+both sides had laid down their arms and fraternized. The Union grew,
+strong and indissoluble. Men settled down to farming, to artisanship, to
+merchandising, and their wounds were healed. Amnesty was extended to
+those who wished it and deserved it. These men could have found a living
+easy to them, for the farming lands still lay rich and ready for them.
+But they did not want this life of toil. They preferred the ways of
+robbery and blood in which they had begun. They cherished animosity now,
+not against the Federals, but against mankind. The social world was
+their field of harvest; and they reaped it, weapon in hand.</p>
+
+<p>The James family originally came from Kentucky, <!-- Page 349 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span>where Frank was born,
+in Scott county, in 1846. The father, Robert James, was a Baptist
+minister of the Gospel. He removed to Clay county, Missouri, in 1849,
+and Jesse was born there in 1850. Reverend Robert James left for
+California in 1851 and never returned. The mother, a woman of great
+strength of character, later married a Doctor Samuels. She was much
+embittered by the persecution of her family, as she considered it. She
+herself lost an arm in an attack by detectives upon her home, in which a
+young son was killed. The family had many friends and confederates
+throughout the country; else the James boys must have found an end long
+before they were brought to justice.</p>
+
+<p>From precisely the same surroundings came the Younger boys, Thomas
+Coleman, or "Cole," Younger, and his brothers, John, Bruce, James, and
+Robert. Their father was Henry W. Younger, who settled in Jackson
+county, Missouri, in 1825, and was known as a man of ability and worth.
+For eight years he was county judge, and was twice elected to the state
+legislature. He had fourteen children, of whom five certainly were bad.
+At one time he owned large bodies of land, and he was a prosperous
+<!-- Page 350 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span>merchant in Harrisonville for some time. Cole Younger was born January
+15, 1844, John in 1846, Bruce in 1848, James in 1850, and Bob in 1853.
+As these boys grew old enough, they joined the Quantrell bands, and
+their careers were precisely the same as those of the James boys. The
+cause of their choice of sides was the same. Jennison, the Kansas
+jayhawker leader, in one of his raids into Missouri, burned the houses
+of Younger and confiscated the horses in his livery stables. After that
+the boys of the family swore revenge.</p>
+
+<p>At the close of the war, the Younger and James boys worked together very
+often, and were leaders of a band which had a cave in Clay county and
+numberless farm houses where they could expect shelter in need. With
+them, part of the time, were George and Ollie Shepherd; other members of
+their band were Bud Singleton, Bob Moore, Clel Miller and his brother,
+Arthur McCoy; others who came and went from time to time were regularly
+connected with the bigger operations. It would be wearisome to recount
+the long list of crimes these men committed for ten or fifteen years
+after the war. They certainly brought notoriety <!-- Page 351 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span>to their country. They
+had the entire press of America reproaching the State of Missouri; they
+had the governors of that state and two or three others at their wits'
+end; they had the best forces of the large city detective agencies
+completely baffled. They killed two detectives&mdash;one of whom, however,
+killed John Younger before he died&mdash;and executed another in cold blood
+under circumstances of repellant brutality. They raided over Missouri,
+Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, even as far east as West Virginia, as far
+north as Minnesota, as far south as Texas and even old Mexico. They
+looted dozens of banks, and held up as many railway passenger trains and
+as many stage coaches and travelers as they liked. The James boys alone
+are known to have taken in their robberies $275,000, and, including the
+unlawful gains of their colleagues, the Youngers, no doubt they could
+have accounted for over half a million dollars. They laughed at the law,
+defied the state and county governments, and rode as they liked, here,
+there, and everywhere, until the name of law in the West was a mockery.
+If magnitude in crime be claim to distinction, they might ask the title,
+for surely their exploits were unrivaled, and perhaps cannot <!-- Page 352 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span>again be
+equaled. And they did all of these unbelievable things in the heart of
+the Mississippi valley, in a country thickly settled, in the face of a
+long reputation for criminal deeds, and in a country fully warned
+against them! Surely, it seems sometimes that American law is weak.</p>
+
+<p>It was much the same story in all the long list of robberies of small
+country banks. A member of the gang would locate the bank and get an
+idea of the interior arrangements. Two or three of the gang would step
+in and ask to have a bill changed; then they would cover the cashier
+with revolvers and force him to open the safe. If he resisted, he was
+killed; sometimes killed no matter what he did, as was cashier Sheets in
+the Gallatin bank robbery. The guard outside kept the citizens terrified
+until the booty was secured; then flight on good horses followed. After
+that ensued the frantic and unorganized pursuit by citizens and
+officers, possibly another killing or two <i>en route</i>, and a return to
+their lurking place in Clay county, Missouri, where they never had any
+difficulty in proving all the <i>alibis</i> they needed. None of these men
+ever confessed to a full list of these robberies, and, even years later,
+<!-- Page 353 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span>they all denied complicity; but the facts are too well known to warrant
+any attention to their denials, founded upon a very natural reticence.
+Of course, their safety lay in the sympathy of a large number of
+neighbors of something the same kidney; and fear of retaliation supplied
+the only remaining motive needed to enforce secrecy.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the most noted bank robberies in which the above mentioned men,
+or some of them, were known to have been engaged were as follows: The
+Clay County Savings Association, of Liberty, Missouri, February 14,
+1866, in which a little boy by name of Wymore was shot to pieces because
+he obeyed the orders of the bank cashier and gave the alarm; the bank of
+Alexander Mitchell &amp; Co., Lexington, Missouri, October 30, 1860; the
+McLain Bank, of Savannah, Missouri, March 2, 1867, in which Judge McLain
+was shot and nearly killed; the Hughes &amp; Mason Bank, of Richmond,
+Missouri, May 23, 1867, and the later attack on the jail, in which Mayor
+Shaw, Sheriff J. B. Griffin, and his brave fifteen-year-old boy were all
+killed; the bank of Russellville, Kentucky, March 20, 1868, in which
+cashier Long was badly beaten; the Daviess County <!-- Page 354 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span>Savings Bank, of
+Gallatin, Missouri, December 7, 1869, in which cashier John Sheets was
+brutally killed; the bank of Obocock Brothers, Corydon, Iowa, June 3,
+1871, in which forty thousand dollars was taken, although no one was
+killed; the Deposit Bank, of Columbia, Missouri, April 29, 1872, in
+which cashier R. A. C. Martin was killed; the Savings Association, of
+Ste. Genevieve, Missouri; the Bank of Huntington, West Virginia,
+September 1, 1875, in which one of the bandits, McDaniels, was killed;
+the Bank of Northfield, Minnesota, September 7, 1876, in which cashier
+J. L. Haywood was killed, A. E. Bunker wounded, and several of the
+bandits killed and captured as later described.</p>
+
+<p>These same men or some of them also robbed a stage coach now and then;
+near Hot Springs, Arkansas, for example, January 15, 1874, where they
+picked up four thousand dollars, and included ex-Governor Burbank, of
+Dakota, among their victims, taking from him alone fifteen hundred
+dollars; the San Antonio-Austin coach, in Texas, May 12, 1875, in which
+John Breckenridge, president of the First National Bank of San Antonio,
+was relieved of one thousand dollars; and the Mammoth <!-- Page 355 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span>Cave, Kentucky,
+stage, September 3, 1880, where they took nearly two thousand dollars in
+cash and jewelry from passengers of distinction.</p>
+
+<p>The most daring of their work, however, and that which brought them into
+contact with the United States government for tampering with the mails,
+was their repeated robbery of railway mail trains, which became a matter
+of simplicity and certainty in their hands. To flag a train or to stop
+it with an obstruction; or to get aboard and mingle with the train crew,
+then to halt the train, kill any one who opposed them, and force the
+opening of the express agent's safe, became a matter of routine with
+them in time, and the amount of cash they thus obtained was staggering
+in the total. The most noted train robberies in which members of the
+James-Younger bands were engaged were the Rock Island train robbery near
+Council Bluffs, Iowa, July 21, 1873, in which engineer Rafferty was
+killed in the wreck, and but small booty secured; the Gad's Hill,
+Missouri, robbery of the Iron Mountain train, January 28, 1874, in which
+about five thousand dollars was secured from the express agent, mail
+bags and passengers; the Kansas-Pacific train robbery <!-- Page 356 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span>near Muncie,
+Kansas, December 12, 1874, in which they secured more than fifty-five
+thousand dollars in cash and gold dust, with much jewelry; the
+Missouri-Pacific train robbery at Rocky Cut, July 7, 1876, where they
+held the train for an hour and a quarter and secured about fifteen
+thousand dollars in all; the robbery of the Chicago &amp; Alton train near
+Glendale, Missouri, October 7, 1879, in which the James boys' gang
+secured between thirty-five and fifty thousand dollars in currency; the
+robbery of the Rock Island train near Winston, Missouri, July 15, 1881,
+by the James boys' gang, in which conductor Westfall was killed,
+messenger Murray badly beaten, and a passenger named MacMillan killed,
+little booty being obtained; the Blue Cut robbery of the Alton train,
+September 7, 1881, in which the James boys and eight others searched
+every passenger and took away a two-bushel sack full of cash, watches,
+and jewelry, beating the express messenger badly because they got so
+little from the safe. This last robbery caused the resolution of
+Governor Crittenden, of Missouri, to take the bandits dead or alive, a
+reward of thirty thousand dollars being arranged by different railways
+and express companies, a price <!-- Page 357 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span>of ten thousand dollars each being put
+on the heads of Frank and Jesse James.</p>
+
+<p>Outside of this long list of the bandit gang's deeds of outlawry, they
+were continually in smaller undertakings of a similar nature. Once they
+took away ten thousand dollars in cash at the box office of the Kansas
+City Fair, this happening September 26, 1872, in a crowded city, with
+all the modern machinery of the law to guard its citizens. Many acts at
+widely separated parts of the country were accredited to the Younger or
+the James boys, and although they cannot have been guilty of all of
+them, and, although many of the adventures accredited to them in Texas,
+Mexico, California, the Indian Nations, etc., bear earmarks of
+apocryphal origin, there is no doubt that for twenty years after the
+close of the civil war they made a living in this way, their gang being
+made up of perhaps a score of different men in all, and usually
+consisting of about six to ten men, according to the size of the
+undertaking on hand.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime, all these years, the list of homicides for each of them was
+growing. Jesse James killed three men out of six who attacked his house
+one night, and not long after Frank <!-- Page 358 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span>and he are alleged to have killed
+six men in a gambling fight in California. John and Jim Younger killed
+the Pinkerton detectives Lull and Daniels, John being himself killed at
+that time by Daniels. A little later, Frank and Jesse James and Clel
+Miller killed detective Wicher, of the same agency, torturing him for
+some time before his death in the attempt to make him divulge the
+Pinkerton plans. The James boys killed Daniel Askew in revenge; and
+Jesse James and Jim Anderson killed Ike Flannery for motives of robbery.
+This last set the gang into hostile camps, for Flannery was a nephew of
+George Shepherd. Shepherd later killed Anderson in Texas for his share
+in that act; he also shot Jesse James and for a long time supposed he
+had killed him.</p>
+
+<p>The full record of these outlaws will never be known. Their career came
+to an end soon after the heavy rewards were put upon their heads, and it
+came in the usual way, through treachery. Allured by the prospect of
+gaining ten thousand dollars, two cousins of Jesse James, Bob and
+Charlie Ford, pretending to join his gang for another robbery, became
+members of Jesse James' household while he was living <i>incognito</i> as
+Thomas Howard. On the <!-- Page 359 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span>morning of April 3, 1882, Bob Ford, a mere boy,
+not yet twenty years of age, stepped behind Jesse James as he was
+standing on a chair dusting off a picture frame, and, firing at close
+range, shot him through the head and killed him. Bob Ford never got much
+respect for his act, and his money was soon gone. He himself was killed
+in February, 1892, at Creede, Colorado, by a man named Kelly.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"><a name="i401">
+<img src="images/i401.jpg" class="jpg" width="600" height="421" alt="THE OLD FRITZ RANCH" title="" />
+<span class="caption">THE OLD FRITZ RANCH</span>
+</a></div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"><a name="i4012">
+<img src="images/i4012.jpg" class="jpg" width="600" height="427" alt="A BORDER FORTRESS" title="" />
+<span class="caption">A BORDER FORTRESS</span>
+</a></div>
+
+<p>Jesse James was about five feet ten inches in height, and weighed about
+one hundred and sixty-five pounds. His hair and eyes were brown. He had,
+during his life, been shot twice through the lungs, once through the
+leg, and had lost a finger of the left hand from a bullet wound. Frank
+James was slighter than his brother, with light hair and blue eyes, and
+a ragged, reddish mustache. Frank surrendered to Governor Crittenden
+himself at Jefferson City, in October, 1882, taking off his revolvers
+and saying that no man had touched them but himself since 1861. He was
+sentenced to the penitentiary for life, but later pardoned, as he was
+thought to be dying of consumption. At this writing, he is still alive,
+somewhat old and bent now, but leading a quiet and steady life, and
+showing no disposition to <!-- Page 360 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span>return to his old ways. He is sometimes seen
+around the race tracks, where he does but little talking. Frank James
+has had many apologists, and his life should be considered in connection
+with the environments in which he grew up. He killed many men, but he
+was never as cold and cruel as Jesse, and of the two he was the braver
+man, men say who knew them both. He never was known to back down under
+any circumstances.</p>
+
+<p>The fate of the Younger boys was much mingled with that of the James
+boys, but the end of the careers of the former came in more dramatic
+fashion. The wonder is that both parties should have clung together so
+long, for it is certain that Cole Younger once intended to kill Jesse
+James, and one night he came near killing George Shepherd through
+malicious statements Jesse James had made to him about the latter.
+Shepherd met Cole at the house of a friend named Hudspeth, in Jackson
+county, and their host put them in the same bed that night for want of
+better accommodations. "After we lay down," said Shepherd later, in
+describing this, "I saw Cole reach up under his pillow and draw out a
+pistol, which he put beside him under the cover. Not to be taken
+unawares, <!-- Page 361 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span>I at once grasped my own pistol and shoved it down under the
+covers beside me. Were it to save my life, I couldn't tell what reason
+Cole had for becoming my enemy. We talked very little, but just lay
+there watching each other. He was behind and I on the front side of the
+bed, and during the entire night we looked into each other's eyes and
+never moved. It was the most wretched night I ever passed in my life."
+So much may at times be the price of being "bad." By good fortune, they
+did not kill each other, and the next day Cole told Shepherd that he had
+expected him to shoot on sight, as Jesse James had said he would.
+Explanations then followed. It nearly came to a collision between Cole
+Younger and Jesse James later, for Cole challenged him to fight, and it
+was only with difficulty that their friends accommodated the matter.</p>
+
+<p>The history of the Younger boys is tragic all the way through. Their
+father was assassinated, their mother was forced to set fire to her own
+house and destroy it under penalty of death; three sisters were arrested
+and confined in a barracks at Kansas City, which during a high wind fell
+in, killed two of the girls and crippled the other. John Younger was a
+murderer <!-- Page 362 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span>at the age of fourteen, and how many times Cole Younger was a
+murderer, with or without his wish, will never be known. He was shot
+three times in one fight in guerrilla days, and probably few bad men
+ever carried off more lead than he.</p>
+
+<p>The story of the Northfield bank robbery in Minnesota, which ended so
+disastrously to the bandits who undertook it, is interesting as showing
+what brute courage, and, indeed, what fidelity and fortitude may at
+times be shown by dangerous specimens of bad men. The purpose of the
+robbery was criminal, its carrying out was attended with murder, and the
+revenge for it came sharp and swift. In all the annals of desperadoes,
+there is not a battle more striking than this which occurred in a sleepy
+and contented little village in the quiet northern farming country,
+where no one for a moment dreamed that the bandits of the rumored bloody
+lands along the Missouri would ever trouble themselves to come. The
+events immediately connected with this tragedy, the result of which was
+the ending of the Younger gang, were as hereinafter described.</p>
+
+<p>Bill Chadwell, alias Styles, a member of the James boys gang, had
+formerly lived in Minnesota. <!-- Page 363 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span>He drew a pleasing picture of the wealth
+of that country, and the ease with which it could be obtained by bandit
+methods. Cole Younger was opposed to going so far from home, but was
+overruled. He finally joined the others&mdash;Frank and Jesse James, Clel
+Miller, Jim and Bob Younger, Charlie Pitts and Chadwell. They went to
+Minnesota by rail, and, after looking over the country, purchased good
+horses, and prepared to raid the little town of Northfield, in Rice
+county. They carried their enterprise into effect on September 7, 1876,
+using methods with which earlier experience had made them familiar. They
+rode into the middle of the town and opened fire, ordering every one off
+the streets. Jesse James, Charlie Pitts and Bob Younger entered the
+bank, where they found cashier J. L. Haywood, with two clerks, Frank
+Wilcox and A. E. Bunker. Bunker started to run, and Bob Younger shot him
+through the shoulder. They ordered Haywood to open the safe, but he
+bluntly refused, even though they slightly cut him in the throat to
+enforce obedience. Firing now began from the citizens on the street, and
+the bandits in the bank hurried in their work, contenting themselves
+with such loose cash as they found in the <!-- Page 364 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span>drawers and on the counter.
+As they started to leave the bank, Haywood made a motion toward a drawer
+as if to find a weapon. Jesse James turned and shot him through the
+head, killing him instantly. These three of the bandits then sprang out
+into the street. They were met by the fire of Doctor Wheeler and several
+other citizens, Hide, Stacey, Manning and Bates. Doctor Wheeler was
+across the street in an upstairs room, and as Bill Chadwell undertook to
+mount his horse, Wheeler fired and shot him dead. Manning fired at Clel
+Miller, who had mounted, and shot him from his horse. Cole Younger was
+by this time ready to retreat, but he rode up to Miller, and removed
+from his body his belt and pistols. Manning fired again, and killed the
+horse behind which Bob Younger was hiding, and an instant later a shot
+from Wheeler struck Bob in the right elbow. Although this arm was
+disabled Bob shifted his pistol to his left hand and fired at Bates,
+cutting a furrow through his cheek, but not killing him. About this time
+a Norwegian by the name of Gustavson appeared on the street, and not
+halting at the order to do so, he was shot through the head by one of
+the bandits, receiving a wound from which he died a few <!-- Page 365 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span>days later. The
+gang then began to scatter and retreat. Jim Younger was on foot and was
+wounded. Cole rode back up the street, and took the wounded man on his
+horse behind him. The entire party then rode out of town to the west,
+not one of them escaping without severe wounds.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as the bandits had departed, news was sent by telegraph,
+notifying the surrounding country of the robbery. Sheriffs, policemen
+and detectives rallied in such numbers that the robbers were hard put to
+it to escape alive. A state reward of $1,000 for each was published, and
+all lower Minnesota organized itself into a determined man hunt. The
+gang undertook to get over the Iowa line, and they managed to keep away
+from their pursuers until the morning of the 13th, a week after the
+robbery. The six survivors were surrounded on that day in a strip of
+timber. Frank and Jesse James broke through, riding the same horse. They
+were fired upon, a bullet striking Frank James in the right knee, and
+passing through into Jesse's right thigh. None the less, the two got
+away, stole a horse apiece that night, and passed on to the Southwest.
+They rode bareback, and now and again enforced a horse trade <!-- Page 366 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span>with a
+farmer or livery-stable man. They got down near Sioux Falls, and there
+met Doctor Mosher, whom they compelled to dress their wounds, and to
+furnish them horses and clothing. Later on their horses gave out, and
+they hired a wagon and kept on. Their escape seems incomprehensible, yet
+it is the case that they got quite clear, finally reaching Missouri.</p>
+
+<p>Of the other bandits there were left Cole, Jim and Bob Younger and
+Charlie Pitts; and after these a large number of citizens followed
+close. In spite of the determined pursuit, they kept out of reach for
+another week. On the morning of September 21st, two weeks after the
+robbery, they were located in the woods along the Watonwan river, not
+far from Madelia. Sheriff Glispin hurriedly got together a posse and
+surrounded them in a patch of timber not over five acres in extent. In a
+short time more than one hundred and fifty men were about this cover;
+but although they kept up firing, they could not drive out the concealed
+bandits. Sheriff Glispin called for volunteers; and with Colonel Vaught,
+Ben Rice, George Bradford, James Severson, Charles Pomeroy and Captain
+Murphy moved into the cover. As they advanced, Charlie Pitts sprang out
+from <!-- Page 367 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span>the brush, and fired point blank at Glispin. At the same instant
+the latter also fired and shot Pitts, who ran a short distance and fell
+dead. Then Cole, Bob and Jim Younger stood up and opened fire as best
+they could, all of the men of the storming party returning their fire.
+Murphy was struck in the body by a bullet, and his life was saved by his
+pipe, which he carried in his vest pocket. Another member of the posse
+had his watch blown to pieces by a bullet. The Younger boys gave back a
+little, but this brought them within sight of those surrounding the
+thicket, so they retreated again close to the line of the volunteers.
+Cole and Jim Younger were now badly shot. Bob, with his broken right
+arm, stood his ground, the only one able to continue the fight, and kept
+his revolver going with his left hand. The others handed him their
+revolvers after his own was empty. The firing from the posse still
+continued, and at last Bob called out to them to stop, as his brothers
+were all shot to pieces. He threw down his pistol, and walked forward to
+the sheriff, to whom he surrendered. Bob always spoke with respect of
+Sheriff Glispin both as a fighter and as a peace officer. One of the
+farmers drew up his gun to kill Bob after <!-- Page 368 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span>he had surrendered, but
+Glispin told him to drop his gun or he would kill him.</p>
+
+<p>It is doubtful if any set of men ever showed more determination and more
+ability to stand punishment than these misled outlaws. Bob Younger was
+hurt less than any of the others. His arm had been broken at Northfield
+two weeks before, but he was wounded but once, slightly in the body, out
+of all the shots fired at him while in the thicket. Cole Younger had a
+rifle bullet in the right cheek, which paralyzed his right eye. He had
+received a .45 revolver bullet through the body, and also had been shot
+through the thigh at Northfield. He received eleven different wounds in
+the fight, or thirteen bad wounds in all, enough to have killed a half
+dozen men. Jim's case seemed even worse, for he had in his body eight
+buckshot and a rifle bullet. He had been shot through the shoulder at
+Northfield, and nearly half his lower jaw had been carried away by a
+heavy bullet, a wound which caused him intense suffering. Bob was the
+only one able to stand on his feet.</p>
+
+<p>Of the two men killed in town, Clel Miller and Bill Chadwell, the former
+had a long record in bank robberies; the latter, guide in the <!-- Page 369 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span>ill-fated
+expedition to Minnesota, was a horse thief of considerable note at one
+time in lower Minnesota.</p>
+
+<p>The prisoners were placed in jail at Faribault, the county seat of Rice
+county, and in a short time the Grand Jury returned true bills against
+them, charging them with murder and robbery. Court convened November
+7th, Judge Lord being on the bench. All of the prisoners pleaded guilty,
+and the order of the court was that each should be confined in the state
+penitentiary for the period of his natural life.</p>
+
+<p>The later fate of the Younger boys may be read in the succinct records
+of the Minnesota State Prison at Stillwater:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"<i>Thos. Coleman Younger</i>, sentenced Nov. 20, 1876, from Rice county
+under a life sentence for the crime of Murder in the first degree.
+Paroled July 14, 1901. Pardoned Feb. 4, 1903, on condition that he leave
+the State of Minnesota, and that he never exhibit himself in public in
+any way.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>James Younger</i>, sentenced Nov. 20, 1876, from Rice county under a life
+sentence for the crime of Murder in the first degree. Paroled July 13,
+1901. Shot himself with a revolver <!-- Page 370 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span>in the city of St. Paul, Minn., and
+died at once from the wound inflicted on Oct. 19, 1902.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Robt. Younger</i>, sentenced Nov. 20, 1876, from Rice county under a life
+sentence for the crime of Murder in the first degree. He died Sept. 16,
+1889, of phthisis."</p></div>
+
+<p>The James boys almost miraculously escaped, traveled clear across the
+State of Iowa and got back to their old haunts. They did not stop, but
+kept on going until they got to Mexico, where they remained for some
+time. They did not take their warning, however, and some of their most
+desperate train robberies were committed long after the Younger boys
+were in the penitentiary.</p>
+
+<p>In view of the bloody careers of all these men, it is to be said that
+the law has been singularly lenient with them. Yet the Northfield
+incident was conclusive, and was the worst setback ever received by any
+gang of bad men; unless, perhaps, that was the defeat of the Dalton gang
+at Coffeyville, Kansas, some years later, the story of which is given in
+the following chapter.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page 371 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Chapter_XXI" id="Chapter_XXI"></a>Chapter XXI</h2>
+
+<p>Bad Men of the Indian Nations&mdash;<i>A Hotbed of Desperadoes</i>&mdash;<i>Reasons for
+Bad Men in the Indian Nations</i>&mdash;<i>The Dalton Boys</i>&mdash;<i>The Most Desperate
+Street Fight of the West</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p>What is true for Texas, in the record of desperadoism, is equally
+applicable to the country adjoining Texas upon the north, long known
+under the general title of the Indian Nations; although it is now
+rapidly being divided and allotted under the increasing demands of an
+ever-advancing civilization.</p>
+
+<p>The great breeding ground of outlaws has ever been along the line of
+demarcation between the savage and the civilized. Here in the Indian
+country, as though in a hotbed especially contrived, the desperado has
+flourished for generations. The Indians themselves retained much their
+old savage standards after <!-- Page 372 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span>they had been placed in this supposedly
+perpetual haven of refuge by the government. They have been followed,
+ever since the first movement of the tribes into these reservations, by
+numbers of unscrupulous whites such as hang on the outskirts of the
+settlements and rebel at the requirements of civilization. Many white
+men of certain type married among the Indians, and the half-breed is
+reputed as a product inheriting the bad traits of both races and the
+good ones of neither&mdash;a sweeping statement not always wholly true. Among
+these also was a large infusion of negro blood, emanating from the
+slaves brought in by the Cherokees, and added to later by negroes moving
+in and marrying among the tribes. These mixed bloods seem to have been
+little disposed toward the ways of law and order. Moreover, the system
+of law was here, of course, altogether different from that of the
+States. The freedom from restraint, the exemption from law, which always
+marked the border, here found their last abiding place. The Indians were
+not adherents to the white man's creed, save as to the worst features,
+and they kept their own creed of blood. No man will ever know how many
+murders have been committed in these fair and pleasant <!-- Page 373 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span>savannahs, among
+these rough hills or upon these rolling grassy plains from the time
+William Clark, the "Red Head Chief," began the government work of
+settling the tribes in these lands, then supposed to be far beyond the
+possible demands of the white population of America.</p>
+
+<p>Life could be lived here with small exertion. The easy gifts of the soil
+and the chase, coupled with the easy gifts of the government, unsettled
+the minds of all from those habits of steady industry and thrift which
+go with the observance of the law. If one coveted his neighbor's
+possessions, the ready arbitrament of firearms told whose were the
+spoils. Human life has been cheap here for more than half a hundred
+years; and this condition has endured directly up to and into the days
+of white civilization. The writer remembers very well that in his
+hunting expeditions of twenty years ago it was always held dangerous to
+go into the Nations; and this was true whether parties went in across
+the Neutral Strip, or farther east among the Osages or the Creeks. The
+country below Coffeyville was wild and remote as we saw it then,
+although now it is settling up, is traversed by railroads, and is slowly
+passing into the hands of white <!-- Page 374 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span>men in severalty, as fast as the
+negroes release their lands, or as fast as the government allows the
+Indians to give individual titles. In those days it was a matter of
+small concern if a traveler never returned from a journey among the
+timber clad mountains, or the black jack thickets along the rivers; and
+many was the murder committed thereabouts that never came to light.</p>
+
+<p>In and around the Indian Nations there have also always been refugees
+from the upper frontier or from Texas or Arkansas. The country was long
+the natural haven of the lawless, as it has long been the designated
+home of a wild population. In this region the creed has been much the
+same even after the wild ethics of the cow men yielded to the scarcely
+more lawful methods of the land boomer.</p>
+
+<p>Each man in the older days had his own notion of personal conduct, as
+each had his own opinions about the sacredness of property. It was
+natural that train robbing and bank looting should become recognized
+industries when the railroads and towns came into this fertile region,
+so long left sacred to the chase. The gangs of such men as the Cook
+boys, the Wickcliffe boys, or the Dalton boys, were natural and logical
+products of an environment. That this <!-- Page 375 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span>should be the more likely may be
+seen from the fact that for a decade or more preceding the great rushes
+of the land grabbers, the exploits of the James and Younger boys in
+train and bank robbing had filled all the country with the belief that
+the law could be defied successfully through a long term of years. The
+Cook boys acted upon this basis, until at length marshals shot them
+both, killed one and sent the remnants of the other to the penitentiary.</p>
+
+<p>Since it would be impossible to go into any detailed mention of the
+scores and hundreds of desperadoes who have at different times been
+produced by the Nations, it may be sufficient to give a few of the
+salient features of the careers of the band which, as well as any, may
+be called typical of the Indian Nations brand of desperadoism&mdash;the once
+notorious Dalton boys.</p>
+
+<p>The Dalton family lived in lower Kansas, near Coffeyville, which was
+situated almost directly upon the border of the Nations. They engaged in
+farming, and indeed two of the family were respectable farmers near
+Coffeyville within the last three or four years. The mother of the
+family still lives near Oklahoma City, where she secured a good claim at
+the time of the opening of the Oklahoma lands to white <!-- Page 376 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span>settlement. The
+father, Lewis Dalton, was a Kentucky man and served in the Mexican war.
+He later moved to Jackson county, Missouri, near the home of the
+notorious James and Younger boys, and in 1851 married Adelaide Younger,
+they removing some years later from Missouri to Kansas. Thirteen
+children were born to them, nine sons and four daughters. Charles,
+Henry, Littleton and Coleman Dalton were respected and quiet citizens.
+All the boys had nerve, and many of them reached office as deputy
+marshals. Franklin Dalton was killed while serving as deputy United
+States marshal near Fort Smith, in 1887, his brother Bob being a member
+of the same posse at the time his fight was made with a band of horse
+thieves who resisted arrest. Grattan Dalton, after the death of his
+brother Franklin, was made a deputy United States marshal, after the
+curious but efficient Western fashion of setting dangerous men to work
+at catching dangerous men. He and his posse in 1888 went after a bad
+Indian, who, in the mel&eacute;e, shot Grattan in the arm and escaped. Grattan
+later served as United States deputy marshal in Muskogee district, where
+the courts certainly needed men of stern courage as executives, for they
+had to <!-- Page 377 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span>deal with the most desperate and fearless class of criminals the
+world ever knew. Robert R. Dalton, better known as Bob Dalton, served on
+the posses of his brothers, and soon learned what it was to stand up and
+shoot while being shot at. He turned out to be about the boldest of the
+family, and was accepted as the clan leader later on in their exploits.
+He also was a deputy United States marshal at the dangerous stations of
+Fort Smith and Wichita, having much to do with the desperadoes of the
+Nations. He was chief of the Osage police for some time, and saw
+abundance of violent scenes. Emmett Dalton was also possessed of cool
+nerve, and was soon known as a dangerous man to affront. All the boys
+were good shots, but they seemed to have cared more for the Winchester
+than the six-shooter in their exploits, in which they were perhaps wise,
+for the rifle is of course far the surer when it is possible of use; and
+men mostly rode in that country with rifle under leg.</p>
+
+<p>Uncle Sam is obliged to take such material for his frontier peace
+officers as proves itself efficient in serving processes. A coward may
+be highly moral, but he will not do as a border deputy. The personal
+character of some of the most famous Western deputies would scarcely
+<!-- Page 378 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[Pg 378]</a></span>bear careful scrutiny, but the government at Washington is often
+obliged to wink at that sort of thing. There came a time when it
+remained difficult longer to wink at the methods of the Daltons as
+deputies. In one case they ran off with a big bunch of horses and sold
+them in a Kansas town. On account of this episode, Grattan, William, and
+Emmett Dalton made a hurried trip to California. Here they became
+restless, and went back at their old trade, thinking that no one even on
+the Pacific Slope had any right to cause them fear. They held up a train
+in Tulare county and killed a fireman, but were repulsed. Later arrested
+and tried, William was cleared, but Grattan was sentenced to twenty
+years in the penitentiary. He escaped from jail before he got to the
+penitentiary, and rejoined Emmett at the old haunts in the Nations,
+Emmett having evaded arrest in California. The Southern Pacific railway
+had a standing offer of $6,000 for the robbers at the time they were
+killed.</p>
+
+<p>The Daltons were now more or less obliged to hide out, and to make a
+living as best they could, which meant by robbery. On May 9, 1891, the
+Santa F&eacute; train was held up at Wharton, Oklahoma Territory, and the
+express car <!-- Page 379 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[Pg 379]</a></span>was robbed, the bandits supposedly being the Daltons. In
+June of the following year another Santa F&eacute; train was robbed at Red
+Rock, in the Cherokee strip. The 'Frisco train was robbed at Vinita,
+Indian Territory. An epidemic of the old methods of the James and
+Younger bands seemed to have broken out in the new railway region of the
+Southwest. The next month the Missouri, Kansas and Texas train was held
+up at Adair, Indian Territory, and a general fight ensued between the
+robbers and the armed guard of the train, assisted by citizens of the
+town. A local physician was killed and several officers and citizens
+wounded, but none of the bandits was hurt, and they got away with a
+heavy loot of the express and baggage cars. At Wharton they had been
+less fortunate, for though they killed the station agent, they were
+rounded up and one of their men, Dan Bryant, was captured, later killing
+and being killed by United States deputy Ed. Short, as mentioned in an
+earlier chapter. Dick Broadwell joined the Dalton gang about now, and
+they nearly always had a few members besides those of their own family;
+their gang being made up and conducted on much the same lines of the
+James boys gang of Missouri, whose exploits <!-- Page 380 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span>they imitated and used as
+text for their bolder deeds. In fact it was the boast of the leader, Bob
+Dalton, in the Coffeyville raid, that he was going to beat anything the
+James boys ever did: to rob two banks in one town at the same time.</p>
+
+<p>Bank robbing was a side line of activity with the Daltons, but they did
+fairly well at it. They held up the bank at El Reno, at a time when no
+one was in the bank except the president's wife, and took $10,000,
+obliging the bank to suspend business. By this time the whole country
+was aroused against them, as it had been against the James and Younger
+boys. Pinkerton detectives had blanket commissions offered, and railway
+and express companies offered rewards running into the thousands. Each
+train across the Indian Nations was accompanied for months by a heavily
+armed guard concealed in the baggage and express cars. Passengers
+dreaded the journey across that country, and the slightest halt of the
+train for any cause was sure to bring to the lips of all the word of
+fear, "the Daltons!" It seems almost incredible of belief that, in these
+modern days of fast railway service, of the telegraph and of rapidly
+increasing settlements, the work of these men <!-- Page 381 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span>could so long have been
+continued; but such, none the less, was the case. The law was powerless,
+and demonstrated its own unfitness to safeguard life and property, as so
+often it has in this country. And, as so often has been the case,
+outraged society at length took the law into its own hands and settled
+the matter.</p>
+
+<p>The full tale of the Dalton robberies and murders will never be known,
+for the region in which they operated was reticent, having its own
+secrets to protect; but at last there came the climax in which the band
+was brought into the limelight of civilized publicity. They lived on the
+border of savagery and civilization. Now the press, the telegraph, the
+whole fabric of modern life, lay near at hand. Their last bold raid,
+therefore, in which they crossed from the country of reticence into that
+of garrulous news gathering, made them more famous than they had ever
+been before. The raid on Coffeyville, October 5, 1892, both established
+and ended their reputation as desperadoes of the border.</p>
+
+<p>The rumor got out that the Daltons were down in the Nations, waiting for
+a chance to raid the town of Coffeyville, but the dreaded attack did not
+come off when it was expected. When it was delivered, therefore, it
+found the <!-- Page 382 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span>town quite unprepared. Bob Dalton was the leader in this
+enterprise. Emmett did not want to go. He declared that too many people
+knew them in Coffeyville, and that the job would prove too big for them
+to handle. He consented to join the party, however, when he found Bob
+determined to make the attempt in any case. There were in the band at
+that time Bob, Emmett, and Grattan Dalton, Bill Powers and Dick
+Broadwell. These lay in rendezvous near Tulsa, in the Osage country, two
+days before the raid, and spent the night before in the timber on Onion
+creek, not far below town. They rode into Coffeyville at half-past nine
+the following morning. The street being somewhat torn up, they turned
+aside into an alley about a hundred yards from the main street, and,
+dismounting, tied their horses, which were thus left some distance from
+the banks, the First National and the bank of C. M. Condon &amp; Co., which
+were the objects of their design.</p>
+
+<p>Grattan Dalton, Dick Broadwell and Bill Powers stepped over to the
+Condon bank, which was occupied at the time by C. T. Carpenter, C. M.
+Ball, the cashier, and T. C. Babb, a bookkeeper. Grattan Dalton threw
+down his rifle on Carpenter, with the customary command to <!-- Page 383 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[Pg 383]</a></span>put up his
+hands; the others being attended to by Powers and Broadwell. Producing a
+two-bushel sack, the leader ordered Carpenter to put all the cash into
+it, and the latter obeyed, placing three thousand dollars in silver and
+one thousand in currency in the sack. Grattan wanted the gold, and
+demanded that an inner safe inside the vault should be opened. The
+cashier, Ball, with a shifty falsehood, told him that they could not
+open that safe, for it was set on a time lock, and no one could open it
+before half-past nine o'clock. He told the outlaw that it was now twenty
+minutes after nine (although it was really twenty minutes of ten); and
+the latter said they could wait ten minutes. He was, however, uneasy,
+and was much of the mind to kill Ball on the spot, for he suspected
+treachery, and knew how dangerous any delay must be.</p>
+
+<p>It was a daring thing to do&mdash;to sit down in the heart of a civilized
+city, in broad daylight and on the most public street, and wait for a
+time lock to open a burglar-proof safe. Daring as it was, it was foolish
+and futile. As the robbers stood uneasily guarding their prisoners, the
+alarm was spread. A moment later firing began, and the windows of the
+bank were splintered <!-- Page 384 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[Pg 384]</a></span>with bullets. The robbers were trapped, Broadwell
+being now shot through the arm, probably by P. L. Williams from across
+the street. Yet they coolly went on with their work as they best could,
+Grattan Dalton ordering Ball to cut the string of the bag and pour out
+the heavy silver, which would have encumbered them too much in their
+flight. He asked if there was not a back way out, by which they could
+escape. He was shown a rear door, and the robbers stepped out, to find
+themselves in the middle of the hottest street fight any of them had
+ever known. The city marshal, Charles T. Connolly, had given the alarm,
+and citizens were hurrying to the street with such weapons as they could
+find at the hardware stores and in their own homes.</p>
+
+<p>Meantime Bob and Emmett Dalton had held up the First National Bank,
+ordering cashier Ayres to hand out the money, and terrorizing two or
+three customers of the bank who happened to be present at the time. Bob
+knew Thos. G. Ayres, and called him by his first name, "Tom," said he,
+"go into the safe and get out that money&mdash;get the gold, too." He
+followed Ayres into the vault, and discovered two packages of $5,000
+each in currency, which <!-- Page 385 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[Pg 385]</a></span>he tossed into his meal sack. The robbers here
+also poured out the silver, and having cleaned up the bank as they
+supposed, drove the occupants out of the door in front of them. As they
+got into the street they were fired upon by George Cubine and C. S. Cox;
+but neither shot took effect. Emmett Dalton stood with his rifle under
+his arm, coolly tying up the neck of the sack which held the money. They
+then both stepped back into the bank, and went out through the back
+door, which was opened for them by W. H. Shepherd, the bank teller, who,
+with Tom Ayres and B. S. Ayres, the bookkeeper, made the bank force on
+hand. J. H. Brewster, C. H. Hollingsworth and A. W. Knotts were in the
+bank on business, and were joined by E. S. Boothby; all these being left
+unhurt.</p>
+
+<p>The firing became general as soon as the robbers emerged from the two
+bank buildings. The first man to be shot by the robbers was Charles T.
+Gump, who stood not far from the First National Bank armed with a
+shotgun. Before he could fire Bob Dalton shot him through the hand, the
+same bullet disabling his shotgun. A moment later, a young man named
+Lucius Baldwin started down the alley, armed <!-- Page 386 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[Pg 386]</a></span>with a revolver. He met
+Bob and Emmett, who ordered him to halt, but for some reason he kept on
+toward them. Bob Dalton said, "I'll have to kill you," and so shot him
+through the chest. He died three hours later.</p>
+
+<p>Bob and Emmett Dalton now passed out of the alley back of the First
+National Bank, and came into Union street. Here they saw George B.
+Cubine standing with his Winchester in his hands, and an instant later
+Cubine fell dead, with three balls through his body. Near him was
+Charles Brown, an old man, who was also armed. He was the next victim,
+his body falling near that of Cubine, though he lived for a few hours
+after being shot. All four of these victims of the Daltons were shot at
+distances of about forty or fifty yards, and with rifles, the revolver
+being more or less uncertain at such ranges even in practiced hands. All
+the gang had revolvers, but none used them.</p>
+
+<p>Thos. G. Ayres, late prisoner in the First National Bank, ran into a
+store near by as soon as he was released, caught up a Winchester and
+took a station near the street door, waiting for the bandits to come out
+at that entrance of the bank. Here he was seen by Bob Dalton, who had
+gone through the alley. Bob took aim <!-- Page 387 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[Pg 387]</a></span>and at seventy-five yards shot
+Ayres through the head. Friends tried to draw his body back into the
+store, but these now met the fire of Grattan Dalton and Powers, who,
+with the crippled Broadwell, were now coming out of their alleyway.</p>
+
+<p>T. A. Reynolds, a clerk in the same store, who went to the door armed,
+received a shot through the foot, and thus made the third wounded man
+then in that building. H. H. Isham, one of the owners of the store,
+aided by M. A. Anderson and Charles K. Smith, joined in the firing.
+Grattan Dalton and Bill Powers were shot mortally before they had gone
+more than a few steps from the door of the Condon bank. Powers tried to
+get into a door when he was shot, and kept his feet when he found the
+door locked, managing to get to his horse in the alley before he was
+killed by a second shot. Grattan Dalton also kept his feet, and reached
+cover back of a barn about seventy yards from Walnut Street, the main
+thorough-fare. He stood at bay here, and kept on firing. City marshal
+Connolly, carrying a rifle, ran across to a spot near the corner of this
+barn. He had his eye on the horses of the bandits, which were still
+hitched in the alley. His back <!-- Page 388 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[Pg 388]</a></span>was turned toward Grattan Dalton. The
+latter must have been crippled somewhere in his right arm or shoulder,
+for he did not raise his rifle to his face, but fired from his hip,
+shooting Connolly down at a distance of about twenty feet or so.</p>
+
+<p>There was a slight lull at this point of the street fight, and during
+this Dick Broadwell, who had been wounded again in the back, crawled
+into concealment in a lumber yard near by the alley where the horses
+were tied. He crept out to his horse and mounted, but just as he started
+away met the livery man, John J. Kloehr, who did some of the best
+shooting recorded by the citizens. Kloehr was hurrying thither with
+Carey Seaman, the latter armed with a shotgun. Kloehr fired his rifle
+and Seaman his shotgun, and both struck Broadwell, who rode away, but
+fell dead from his horse a short distance outside the town.</p>
+
+<p>Bob and Emmett Dalton, after killing Cubine and Brown and shooting
+Ayres, hurried on to join their companions and to get to their horses.
+At an alleyway junction they spied F. D. Benson climbing out of a
+window, and fired at him, but missed. An instant later, as Bob stepped
+into full view of those who were <!-- Page 389 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[Pg 389]</a></span>firing from the Isham store, he was
+struck by a ball and badly wounded. He walked slowly across the alley
+and sat down on a pile of stones, but like his brother Grattan, he kept
+his rifle going, though mortally shot. He fired once at Kloehr, but was
+unsteady and missed him. Rising to his feet he walked a few paces and
+leaned against the corner of a barn, firing two more shots. He was then
+killed by Kloehr, who shot him through the chest.</p>
+
+<p>By this time Grattan Dalton was feebly trying to get to his horse. He
+passed the body of Connolly, whom he had killed, faced toward his
+pursuers and tried to fire. He, too, fell before Kloehr's Winchester,
+shot through the throat, dropping close to the body of Connolly.</p>
+
+<p>Emmett Dalton was now the only one of the band left alive. He was as yet
+unwounded, and he got to his horse. As he attempted to mount a number of
+shots were fired at him, and these killed the two horses belonging to
+Bob Dalton and Bill Powers, who by this time had no further use for
+horses. Two horses hitched to an oil wagon in the street were also
+killed by wild shots. Emmett got into his saddle, but was shot through
+the right arm and through the left hip and groin. He still clung to the
+<!-- Page 390 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[Pg 390]</a></span>sack of money they had taken at the First National Bank, and he still
+kept his nerve and his wits even under such pressure of peril. He might
+have escaped, but instead he rode back to where Bob was lying, and
+reached down his hand to help him up behind himself on the horse. Bob
+was dying and told him it was no use to try to help him. As Emmett
+stooped down to reach Bob's arm, Carey Seaman fired both barrels of his
+shotgun into his back, Emmett dropping near Bob and falling upon the
+sack, containing over $20,000 in cash. Men hurried up and called to him
+to throw up his hands. He raised his one unhurt arm and begged for
+mercy. It was supposed he would die, and he was not lynched, but hurried
+away to a doctor's office near by.</p>
+
+<p>In the little alley where the last scene of this bloody fight took place
+there were found three dead men, one dying man and one badly wounded.
+Three dead horses lay near the same spot. In the whole fight, which was
+of course all over in a few moments, there were killed four citizens and
+four outlaws, three citizens and one outlaw being wounded. Less than a
+dozen citizens did most of the shooting, of which there was
+considerable, eighty bullet <!-- Page 391 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[Pg 391]</a></span>marks being found on the front of the
+Condon bank alone.</p>
+
+<p>The news of this bloody encounter was instantly flashed over the
+country, and within a few hours the town was crowded with sightseers who
+came in by train loads. The dead bandits were photographed, and the
+story of the fight was told over and over again, not always with
+uniformity of detail. Emmett Dalton, before he was sent to the
+penitentiary, confessed to different crimes, not all of them hitherto
+known, which the gang had at different times committed.</p>
+
+<p>So ended in blood the career of as bloody a band as might well be
+discovered in the robber history of any land or time of the world.
+Indeed, it is doubtful if any country ever saw leagues of robbers so
+desperate as those which have existed in America, any with hands so red
+in blood. This fact is largely due to the peculiar history of this
+country, with its rapid development under swift modern methods of
+transportation. In America the advance to the westward of the fighting
+edge of civilization, where it meets and mingles with savagery, has been
+more rapid than has ever been known in the settlement of any country of
+the world. Moreover, <!-- Page 392 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[Pg 392]</a></span>this has taken place at precisely that time when
+weapons of the most deadly nature have been invented and made at a price
+permitting all to own them and many to become extremely skilled with
+them. The temptation and the means of murder have gone hand in hand. And
+in time the people, not the organized law courts, have applied the
+remedy when the time has come for it. To-day the Indian Nations are no
+more than a name. Civilization has taken them over. Statehood has
+followed territorial organization. Presently rich farms will make a
+continuous sea of grain across what was once a flood of crime, and the
+wheat will grow yellow, and the cotton white, where so long the grass
+was red.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><!-- Page 393 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[Pg 393]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="Chapter_XXII" id="Chapter_XXII"></a>Chapter XXII</h2>
+
+<p>Desperadoes of the Cities&mdash;<i>Great Cities Now the Most Dangerous
+Places</i>&mdash;<i>City Bad Men's Contempt for Womanhood</i>&mdash;<i>Nine Thousand Murders
+a Year, and Not Two Hundred Punished</i>&mdash;<i>The Reasonableness of Lynch
+Law</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p>It was stated early in these pages that the great cities and the great
+wildernesses are the two homes for bold crimes; but we have been most
+largely concerned with the latter in our studies of desperadoes and in
+our search for examples of disregard of the law. We have found a
+turbulence, a self-insistence, a vigor and self-reliance in the American
+character which at times has led on to lawlessness on our Western
+frontier.</p>
+
+<p>Conditions have changed. We still revel in Wild West literature, but
+there is little of the wild left in the West of to-day, little of the
+old lawlessness. The most lawless time of America <!-- Page 394 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[Pg 394]</a></span>is to-day, but the
+most lawless parts of America are the most highly civilized parts. The
+most dangerous section of America is not the West, but the East.</p>
+
+<p>The worst men are no longer those of the mountains or the plains, but of
+the great cities. The most absolute lawlessness exists under the shadow
+of the tallest temples of the law, and in the penetralia of that society
+which vaunts itself as the supreme civilization of the world. We have
+had no purpose in these pages to praise any sort of crime or to glorify
+any manner of bad deeds; but if we were forced to make choice among
+criminals, then by all means that choice should be, must be, not the
+brutal murderer of the cities, but the desperado of the old West. The
+one is an assassin, the other was a warrior; the one is a dastard, the
+other was something of a man.</p>
+
+<p>A lawlessness which arises to magnitude is not called lawlessness; and
+killing more than murder is called war. The great industrial centers
+show us what ruthlessness may mean, more cruel and more dangerous than
+the worst deeds of our border fighting men. As for the criminal records
+of our great cities, they surpass by infinity those of the rudest
+wilderness anarchy. <!-- Page 395 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[Pg 395]</a></span>Their nature at times would cause a hardened
+desperado of the West to blush for shame.</p>
+
+<p>One distinguished feature of city badness is the great number of crimes
+against women, ranging from robbery to murder. Now, the desperado, the
+bandit, the robber of the wildest West never made war on any woman,
+rarely ever robbed a woman, even when women mingled with the victims of
+a "stand and deliver" general robbery of a stage or train. The man who
+would kill a woman in the West could never meet his fellow in fair fight
+again. The rope was ready for him, and that right quickly.</p>
+
+<p>But how is it in the great cities, under the shadow of the law? Forget
+the crimes of industrialism, the sweat-shops and factories, which
+undermine the last hope of a nation&mdash;the constitution of its women&mdash;and
+take the open and admitted crimes. One city will suffice for this, and
+that may be the city of Chicago.</p>
+
+<p>In Chicago, in the past twenty-four years, very nearly two thousand
+murders have been committed; and of these, two hundred remain mysteries
+to-day, their perpetrators having gone free and undetected. In the past
+year, seventeen women have been murdered in Chicago, <!-- Page 396 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[Pg 396]</a></span>some under
+circumstances too horrible to mention. In a list of fifty murders by
+unknown parties during the last few years, the whole gamut of dastardly
+crime has been run. The slaughter list is appalling. The story of this
+killing of women is so repellant that one turns to the bloodiest deeds
+of Western personal combats with a feeling of relief; and as one does so
+one adds, "Here at least were men."</p>
+
+<p>The story of Chicago is little worse, according to her population, than
+that of New York, of Boston, of any large city. Foot up the total of the
+thousands of murders committed every year in America. Then, if you wish
+to become a criminal statistician, compare that record with those of
+England, France or Germany. We kill ten persons to England's one; and we
+kill them in the cities.</p>
+
+<p>In the cities it is unlawful to wear arms, and to protect one's self
+against armed attack is therefore impossible. In the cities we have
+policemen. Against real fighting men, the average policeman would be
+helpless. Yet, such as he is, he must be the sole fence against the
+bloody-minded who do not scruple at robbery and murder. In the labor
+riots, the streets of a city are avenues of anarchy, and none of our
+weak-souled <!-- Page 397 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[Pg 397]</a></span>officials, held in the cursed thrall of politics, seems
+able to prevent it. A dozen town marshals of the old stripe would
+restore peace and fill a graveyard in one day of any strike; and their
+peace would be permanent. A real town marshal at the head of a city
+police force, with real fighting men under him, could restore peace and
+fill a graveyard in one month in any city; and that peace would be
+permanent. If we wished the law, we could have it.</p>
+
+<p>The history of the bloodiest lawlessness of the American past shows
+continual repetitions. First, liberty is construed to mean license, and
+license unrebuked leads on to insolence. Still left unrebuked, license
+organizes against the law, taking the form of gangs, factions, bandit
+clans. Then in time the spirit of law arises, and not the law, but the
+offended individuals wronged by too much license, take the matter into
+their own hands, not waiting for the courts, but executing a swifter
+justice. It is the terror of lynch law which has, in countless
+instances, been the foundation of the later courts, with their slow
+moving and absurdly inefficient methods. In time the inefficiency of the
+courts once more begets impatience and contempt. The people again rebel
+at the fact that their government <!-- Page 398 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[Pg 398]</a></span>gives them no government, that their
+courts give them no justice, that their peace officers give them no
+protection. Then they take matters into their hands once more, and show
+both courts and criminals that the people still are strong and terrible.</p>
+
+<p>The deprecation of lynch law, and the whining cry that the law should be
+supported, that the courts should pass on the punishment, is in the
+first place the plea of the weak, and in the second place, the plea of
+the ignorant. He has not read the history of this country, and has never
+understood the American character who says lynch law is wrong. It has
+been the salvation of America a thousand times. It may perhaps again be
+her salvation.</p>
+
+<p>In one way or another the American people will assert the old vigilante
+principle that a man's life, given him by God, and a man's property,
+earned by his own labor, are things he is entitled to defend or have
+defended. He never wholly delegates this right to any government. He may
+rescind his qualified delegation when he finds his chosen servants
+unfaithful or inefficient; and so have back again clean his own great
+and imperishable human rights. A wise law and one enforced is tolerable.
+An <!-- Page 399 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[Pg 399]</a></span>unjust and impure law is intolerable, and it is no wrong to cast
+off allegiance to it. If so, Magna Charta was wrong, and the American
+Revolution earth's greatest example of lynch law!</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 600px;"><a name="i443">
+<img src="images/i443.jpg" class="jpg" width="600" height="366" alt="&quot;AFTERWARD&quot;
+(Fritz Graveyard, New Mexico. Many victims of the Lincoln County War
+buried here)" title="" />
+<span class="caption">&quot;AFTERWARD&quot;</span></a></div>
+<p class="center">Fritz Graveyard, New Mexico. Many victims of the Lincoln County War
+buried here</p>
+
+
+<p>Conclusions parallel to these are expressed by no less a citizen than
+Andrew D. White, long United States Minister to Germany, who, in the
+course of an address at a prominent university of America, in the year
+1906, made the following bold remarks:</p>
+
+<p>"There is a well-defined criminal class in all of our cities; a class of
+men who make crime a profession. Deaths by violence are increasing
+rapidly. Our record is now larger than any other country of the world.
+The number of homicides that are punished by lynching exceeds the number
+punished by due process of law. There is nothing more nonsensical or
+ridiculous than the goody-goody talk about lynching. Much may be said in
+favor of Goldwin Smith's quotation, that 'there are communities in which
+lynch law is better than any other.'</p>
+
+<p>"The pendulum has swung from extreme severity in the last century to
+extreme laxity in this century. There has sprung up a certain
+<!-- Page 400 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[Pg 400]</a></span>sentimental sympathy. In the word of a distinguished jurist, 'the
+taking of life for the highest crime after due process of law is the
+only taking of life which the American people condemn.'</p>
+
+<p>"In the next year 9,000 people will be murdered. As I stand here to-day
+I tell you that 9,000 are doomed to death with all the cruelty of the
+criminal heart, and with no regard for home and families; and two-thirds
+will be due to the maudlin sentiment sometimes called mercy.</p>
+
+<p>"I have no sympathy for the criminal. My sympathy is for those who will
+be murdered; for their families and for their children. This sham
+humanitarianism has become a stench. The cry now is for righteousness.
+The past generation has abolished human slavery. It is for the present
+to deal with the problems of the future, and among them this problem of
+crime."</p>
+
+<p>Against doctrine of this sort none will protest but the politicians in
+power, under whose lax administration of a great trust there has arisen
+one of the saddest spectacles of human history, the decay of the great
+American principles of liberty and fair play. The criminals <!-- Page 401 --><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[Pg 401]</a></span>of our city
+are bold, because they, if not ourselves, know of this decay. They, if
+not ourselves, know the weakness of that political system to which we
+have, in carelessness equaling that of the California miners of old&mdash;a
+carelessness based upon a madness of money equal to or surpassing that
+of the gold stampedes&mdash;delegated our sacred personal rights to live
+freely, to own property, and to protect each for himself his home.</p>
+
+<h4>THE END</h4>
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTES</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_A_1" id="Footnote_A_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_A_1"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> "The Wilderness Hunters." G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York and
+London.</p></div>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_B_2" id="Footnote_B_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_B_2"><span class="label">[B]</span></a> "The Story of the Cowboy," by E. Hough. D. Appleton &amp; Co.,
+New York.</p></div>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_C_3" id="Footnote_C_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_C_3"><span class="label">[C]</span></a> "Life and Adventures of Virgil A. Stewart." Harper and
+Brothers, New York. 1836.</p></div>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_D_4" id="Footnote_D_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_D_4"><span class="label">[D]</span></a> Tuthill: "History of California."</p></div>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_E_5" id="Footnote_E_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_E_5"><span class="label">[E]</span></a> "The Story of the Cowboy," by E. Hough. D. Appleton &amp; Co.
+New York.</p></div>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_F_6" id="Footnote_F_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_F_6"><span class="label">[F]</span></a> "The Story of the Cowboy." By E. Hough. D. Appleton &amp; Co.</p></div>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_G_7" id="Footnote_G_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_G_7"><span class="label">[G]</span></a> See "The Story of the Cowboy," by E. Hough. D. Appleton &amp;
+Co.</p></div>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_H_8" id="Footnote_H_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_H_8"><span class="label">[H]</span></a> Captain Saturnino Baca was a friend of Kit Carson, an
+officer in the New Mexican Volunteers, and the second commanding officer
+of Fort Stanton. He came to Lincoln in 1865, and purchased of J.
+Trujillo the old stone tower, as part of what was then the Baca
+property, near the McSween residence. The Bacas were recognized as
+non-combatants, but were friendly to Major Murphy. Mrs. McSween and Mrs.
+Baca were bitter enemies, and it was commonly said that, as each side
+had a sheriff, each side had a woman. Bonifacio J. Baca, son of Captain
+and Mrs. Baca, was a prot&eacute;g&eacute; of Major Murphy, who sent him to Notre Dame
+University, Indiana, to be educated. "Bonnie" Baca was at different
+times clerk of the probate court, county assessor, deputy sheriff, etc.,
+and was court interpreter under Judge Warren H. Bristol. He was teaching
+school at the time Sheriff Brady was shot, and from his refuge in the
+"round tower," a few feet distant, saw Brady fall. Captain Baca, wife
+and son, were after that closely watched by the men of the McSween
+faction, but managed to remain neutral and never became involved in the
+fighting, though Billy the Kid more than once threatened to kill young
+Baca.</p></div>
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_I_9" id="Footnote_I_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_I_9"><span class="label">[I]</span></a> This man, Ed. Short, later came to a tragic end. A man of
+courage, as has been intimated, he had assisted in the capture of a
+member of the famous Dalton gang, one Dave Bryant, who had robbed a Rock
+Island express train, and was taking him to Wichita, Kansas, to jail. On
+the way Short had occasion to go into the smoker of the train, leaving
+the prisoner in charge of the express messenger, whom Short had
+furnished with a revolver. By some means Bryant became possessed of this
+revolver, held up the messenger, and was in the act of jumping from the
+swiftly moving train, when Short came out of the smoker. Catching sight
+of Short, Bryant fired and struck him, Short returning the fire, and
+both falling from the train together, dead.</p></div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Story of the Outlaw, by Emerson Hough
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Story of the Outlaw, by Emerson Hough
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Story of the Outlaw
+       A Study of the Western Desperado
+
+Author: Emerson Hough
+
+Release Date: January 17, 2008 [EBook #24342]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF THE OUTLAW ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by D. Alexander and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ THE
+ STORY OF THE OUTLAW
+
+ _A STUDY OF THE WESTERN DESPERADO_
+
+ WITH HISTORICAL NARRATIVES OF FAMOUS OUTLAWS;
+ THE STORIES OF NOTED BORDER WARS;
+ VIGILANTE MOVEMENTS AND ARMED
+ CONFLICTS ON THE FRONTIER
+
+ BY
+ EMERSON HOUGH
+
+
+ NEW YORK
+ THE OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY
+ 1907
+
+
+
+
+ COPYRIGHT, 1905, BY
+ THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY
+
+ COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY
+ EMERSON HOUGH
+
+ Entered at Stationers' Hall, London, England
+
+ _All Rights Reserved_
+
+ THE OUTING PRESS
+ DEPOSIT, N. Y.
+
+
+
+
+The Story of the Outlaw
+
+[Illustration: From a painting by John W. Norton
+PLUMMER'S MEN HOLDING UP THE BANNACK STAGE
+(_See page 119_)]
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+In offering this study of the American desperado, the author constitutes
+himself no apologist for the acts of any desperado; yet neither does he
+feel that apology is needed for the theme itself. The outlaw, the
+desperado--that somewhat distinct and easily recognizable figure
+generally known in the West as the "bad man"--is a character unique in
+our national history, and one whose like scarcely has been produced in
+any land other than this. It is not necessary to promote absurd and
+melodramatic impressions regarding a type properly to be called
+historic, and properly to be handled as such. The truth itself is
+thrilling enough, and difficult as that frequently has been of
+discovery, it is the truth which has been sought herein.
+
+A thesis on the text of disregard for law might well be put to better
+use than to serve merely as exciting reading, fit to pass away an idle
+hour. It might, and indeed it may--if the reader so shall choose--offer
+a foundation for wider arguments than those suggested in these pages,
+which deal rather with premises than conclusions. The lesson of our
+dealings with our bad men of the past can teach us, if we like, the best
+method of dealing with our bad men to-day.
+
+There are other lessons which we might take from an acquaintance with
+frontier methods of enforcing respect for the law; and the first of
+these is a practical method of handling criminals in the initial
+executive acts of the law. Never were American laws so strong as to-day,
+and never were our executive officers so weak. Our cities frequently are
+ridden with criminals or rioters. We set hundreds of policemen to
+restore order, but order is not restored. What is the average policeman
+as a criminal-taker? Cloddy and coarse of fiber, rarely with personal
+heredity of mental or bodily vigor, with no training at arms, with no
+sharp, incisive quality of nerve action, fat, unwieldy, unable to run a
+hundred yards and keep his breath, not skilled enough to kill his man
+even when he has him cornered, he is the archetype of all unseemliness
+as the agent of a law which to-day needs a sterner upholding than ever
+was the case in all our national life. We use this sort of tools in
+handling criminals, when each of us knows, or ought to know, that the
+city which would select twenty Western peace officers of the old type
+and set them to work without restrictions as to the size of their
+imminent graveyards, would free itself of criminals in three months'
+time, and would remain free so long as its methods remained in force.
+
+As for the subject-matter of the following work, it may be stated that,
+while attention has been paid to the great and well-known instances and
+epochs of outlawry, many of the facts given have not previously found
+their way into print. The story of the Lincoln County War of the
+Southwest is given truthfully for the first time, and after full
+acquaintance with sources of information now inaccessible or passing
+away. The Stevens County War of Kansas, which took place, as it were,
+but yesterday and directly at our doors, has had no history but a
+garbled one; and as much might be said of many border encounters whose
+chief use heretofore has been to curdle the blood in penny-dreadfuls.
+Accuracy has been sought among the confusing statements purporting to
+constitute the record in such historic movements as those of the
+"vigilantes" of California and Montana mining days, and of the later
+cattle days when "wars" were common between thieves and outlaws, and the
+representatives of law and order,--themselves not always duly
+authenticated officers of the law.
+
+No one man can have lived through the entire time of the American
+frontier; and any work of this kind must be in part a matter of
+compilation in so far as it refers to matters of the past. In all cases
+where practicable, however, the author has made up the records from
+stories of actual participants, survivors and eye-witnesses; and he is
+able in some measure to write of things and men personally known during
+twenty-five years of Western life. Captain Patrick F. Garrett, of New
+Mexico, central figure of the border fighting in that district in the
+early railroad days, has been of much service in extending the author's
+information on that region and time. Mr. Herbert M. Tonney, now of
+Illinois, tells his own story as a survivor of the typical county-seat
+war of Kansas, in which he was shot and left for dead. Many other men
+have offered valuable narratives.
+
+In dealing with any subject of early American history, there is no
+authority more incontestable than Mr. Alexander Hynds, of Dandridge,
+Tennessee, whose acquaintance with singular and forgotten bits of early
+frontier history borders upon the unique in its way. Neither does better
+authority exist than Hon. N. P. Langford, of Minnesota, upon all matters
+having to do with life in the Rocky Mountain region in the decade of
+1860-1870. He was an argonaut of the Rockies and a citizen of Montana
+and of other Western territories before the coming of the days of law.
+Free quotations are made from his graphic work, "Vigilante Days and
+Ways," which is both interesting of itself and valuable as a historical
+record.
+
+The stories of modern train-robbing bandits and outlaw gangs are taken
+partly from personal narratives, partly from judicial records, and
+partly from works frequently more sensational than accurate, and
+requiring much sifting and verifying in detail. Naturally, very many
+volumes of Western history and adventure have been consulted. Much of
+this labor has been one of love for the days and places concerned, which
+exist no longer as they once did. The total result, it is hoped, will
+aid in telling at least a portion of the story of the vivid and
+significant life of the West, and of that frontier whose van, if ever
+marked by human lawlessness, has, none the less, ever been led by the
+banner of human liberty. May that banner still wave to-day, and though
+blood be again the price, may it never permanently be replaced by that
+of license and injustice in our America.
+
+
+
+
+ CONTENTS
+
+
+ CHAPTER                                                   PAGE
+
+     I THE DESPERADO                                          1
+
+    II THE IMITATION DESPERADO                               14
+
+   III THE LAND OF THE DESPERADO                             22
+
+    IV THE EARLY OUTLAW                                      35
+
+     V THE VIGILANTES OF CALIFORNIA                          74
+
+    VI THE OUTLAW OF THE MOUNTAINS                           98
+
+   VII HENRY PLUMMER                                        105
+
+  VIII BOONE HELM                                           127
+
+    IX DEATH SCENES OF DESPERADOES                          137
+
+     X JOSEPH A. SLADE                                      145
+
+    XI THE DESPERADO OF THE PLAINS                          154
+
+   XII WILD BILL HICKOK                                     167
+
+  XIII FRONTIER WARS                                        187
+
+   XIV THE LINCOLN COUNTY WAR                               196
+
+    XV THE STEVENS COUNTY WAR                               227
+
+   XVI BIOGRAPHIES OF BAD MEN                               256
+
+  XVII THE FIGHT OF BUCKSHOT ROBERTS                        284
+
+ XVIII THE MAN HUNT                                         292
+
+   XIX BAD MEN OF TEXAS                                     313
+
+    XX MODERN BAD MEN                                       340
+
+   XXI BAD MEN OF THE INDIAN NATIONS                        371
+
+  XXII DESPERADOES OF THE CITIES                            393
+
+
+
+
+ ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                                   FACING PAGE
+
+ Plummer's Men Holding Up the Bannack Stage    (_Frontispiece_)
+
+ The Scene of Many Little Wars                               12
+
+ Types of Border Barricades                                  36
+
+ The Scene of Many Hangings                                 138
+
+ How the Rustler Worked                                     164
+
+ Wild Bill Hickok's Desperate Fight                         172
+
+ John Simpson Chisum                                        198
+
+ Men Prominent in the Lincoln County War                    218
+
+ The "Women in the Case"                                    222
+
+ The McSween Store and Bank                                 240
+
+ Billy the Kid                                              258
+
+ "The Next Instant He Fired and Shot Ollinger Dead"         272
+
+ Pat F. Garrett                                             294
+
+ A Typical Western Man-Hunt                                 302
+
+ The Old Chisum Ranch                                       330
+
+ The Old Fritz Ranch                                        358
+
+ A Border Fortress                                          358
+
+ "Afterward"                                                398
+
+
+
+
+Chapter I
+
+The Desperado--_Analysis of His Make-up_--_How the Desperado Got to Be
+Bad and Why_--_Some Men Naturally Skillful with Weapons_--_Typical
+Desperadoes_.
+
+
+Energy and action may be of two sorts, good or bad; this being as well
+as we can phrase it in human affairs. The live wires that net our
+streets are more dangerous than all the bad men the country ever knew,
+but we call electricity on the whole good in its action. We lay it under
+law, but sometimes it breaks out and has its own way. These outbreaks
+will occur until the end of time, in live wires and vital men. Each land
+in the world produces its own men individually bad--and, in time, other
+bad men who kill them for the general good.
+
+There are bad Chinamen, bad Filipinos, bad Mexicans, and Indians, and
+negroes, and bad white men. The white bad man is the worst bad man of
+the world, and the prize-taking bad man of the lot is the Western white
+bad man. Turn the white man loose in a land free of restraint--such as
+was always that Golden Fleece land, vague, shifting and transitory,
+known as the American West--and he simply reverts to the ways of
+Teutonic and Gothic forests. The civilized empire of the West has grown
+in spite of this, because of that other strange germ, the love of law,
+anciently implanted in the soul of the Anglo-Saxon. That there was
+little difference between the bad man and the good man who went out
+after him was frequently demonstrated in the early roaring days of the
+West. The religion of progress and civilization meant very little to the
+Western town marshal, who sometimes, or often, was a peace officer
+chiefly because he was a good fighting man.
+
+We band together and "elect" political representatives who do not
+represent us at all. We "elect" executive officers who execute nothing
+but their own wishes. We pay innumerable policemen to take from our
+shoulders the burden of self-protection; and the policemen do not do
+this thing. Back of all the law is the undelegated personal right, that
+vague thing which, none the less, is recognized in all the laws and
+charters of the world; as England and France of old, and Russia to-day,
+may show. This undelegated personal right is in each of us, or ought to
+be. If there is in you no hot blood to break into flame and set you
+arbiter for yourself in some sharp, crucial moment, then God pity you,
+for no woman ever loved you if she could find anything else to love, and
+you are fit neither as man nor citizen.
+
+As the individual retains an undelegated right, so does the body social.
+We employ politicians, but at heart most of us despise politicians and
+love fighting men. Society and law are not absolutely wise nor
+absolutely right, but only as a compromise relatively wise and right.
+The bad man, so called, may have been in large part relatively bad. This
+much we may say scientifically, and without the slightest cheapness. It
+does not mean that we shall waste any maudlin sentiment over a
+desperado; and certainly it does not mean that we shall have anything
+but contempt for the pretender at desperadoism.
+
+Who and what was the bad man? Scientifically and historically he was
+even as you and I. Whence did he come? From any and all places. What
+did he look like? He came in all sorts and shapes, all colors and
+sizes--just as cowards do. As to knowing him, the only way was by trying
+him. His reputation, true or false, just or unjust, became, of course,
+the herald of the bad man in due time. The "killer" of a Western town
+might be known throughout the state or in several states. His reputation
+might long outlast that of able statesmen and public benefactors.
+
+What distinguished the bad man in peculiarity from his fellowman? Why
+was he better with weapons? What is courage, in the last analysis? We
+ought to be able to answer these questions in a purely scientific way.
+We have machines for photographing relative quickness of thought and
+muscular action. We are able to record the varying speeds of impulse
+transmission in the nerves of different individuals. If you were picking
+out a bad man, would you select one who, on the machine, showed a
+dilatory nerve response? Hardly. The relative fitness for a man to be
+"bad," to become extraordinarily quick and skillful with weapons, could,
+without doubt, be predetermined largely by these scientific
+measurements. Of course, having no thought-machines in the early West,
+they got at the matter by experimenting, and so, very often, by a
+graveyard route. You could not always stop to feel the pulse of a
+suspected killer.
+
+The use of firearms with swiftness and accuracy was necessary in the
+calling of the desperado, after fate had marked him and set him apart
+for the inevitable, though possibly long-deferred, end. This skill with
+weapons was a natural gift in the case of nearly every man who attained
+great reputation whether as killer of victims or as killer of killers.
+Practice assisted in proficiency, but a Wild Bill or a Slade or a Billy
+the Kid was born and not made.
+
+Quickness in nerve action is usually backed with good digestion, and
+hard life in the open is good medicine for the latter. This, however,
+does not wholly cover the case. A slow man also might be a brave man.
+Sooner or later, if he went into the desperado business on either side
+of the game, he would fall before the man who was brave as himself and a
+fraction faster with the gun.
+
+There were unknown numbers of potential bad men who died mute and
+inglorious after a life spent at a desk or a plow. They might have been
+bad if matters had shaped right for that. Each war brings out its own
+heroes from unsuspected places; each sudden emergency summons its own
+fit man. Say that a man took to the use of weapons, and found himself
+arbiter of life and death with lesser animals, and able to grant them
+either at a distance. He went on, pleased with his growing skill with
+firearms. He discovered that as the sword had in one age of the world
+lengthened the human arm, so did the six-shooter--that epochal
+instrument, invented at precisely that time of the American life when
+the human arm needed lengthening--extend and strengthen his arm, and
+make him and all men equal. The user of weapons felt his powers
+increased. So now, in time, there came to him a moment of danger. There
+was his enemy. There was the affront, the challenge. Perhaps it was male
+against male, a matter of sex, prolific always in bloodshed. It might be
+a matter of property, or perhaps it was some taunt as to his own
+personal courage. Perhaps alcohol came into the question, as was often
+the case. For one reason or the other, it came to the ordeal of combat.
+It was the undelegated right of one individual against that of another.
+The law was not invoked--the law would not serve. Even as the quicker
+set of nerves flashed into action, the arm shot forward, and there
+smote the point of flame as did once the point of steel. The victim
+fell, his own weapon clutched in his hand, a fraction too late. The law
+cleared the killer. It was "self-defense." "It was an even break," his
+fellowmen said; although thereafter they were more reticent with him and
+sought him out less frequently.
+
+"It was an even break," said the killer to himself--"an even break, him
+or me." But, perhaps, the repetition of this did not serve to blot out a
+certain mental picture. I have had a bad man tell me that he killed his
+second man to get rid of the mental image of his first victim.
+
+But this exigency might arise again; indeed, most frequently did arise.
+Again the embryo bad man was the quicker. His self-approbation now,
+perhaps, began to grow. This was the crucial time of his life. He might
+go on now and become a bad man, or he might cheapen and become an
+imitation desperado. In either event, his third man left him still more
+confident. His courage and his skill in weapons gave him assuredness and
+ease at the time of an encounter. He was now becoming a specialist. Time
+did the rest, until at length they buried him.
+
+The bad man of genuine sort rarely looked the part assigned to him in
+the popular imagination. The long-haired blusterer, adorned with a
+dialect that never was spoken, serves very well in fiction about the
+West, but that is not the real thing. The most dangerous man was apt to
+be quiet and smooth-spoken. When an antagonist blustered and threatened,
+the most dangerous man only felt rising in his own soul, keen and stern,
+that strange exultation which often comes with combat for the man
+naturally brave. A Western officer of established reputation once said
+to me, while speaking of a recent personal difficulty into which he had
+been forced: "I hadn't been in anything of that sort for years, and I
+wished I was out of it. Then I said to myself, 'Is it true that you are
+getting old--have you lost your nerve?' Then all at once the old feeling
+came over me, and I was just like I used to be. I felt calm and happy,
+and I laughed after that. I jerked my gun and shoved it into his
+stomach. He put up his hands and apologized. 'I will give you a hundred
+dollars now,' he said, 'if you will tell me where you got that gun.' I
+suppose I was a trifle quick for him."
+
+The virtue of the "drop" was eminently respected among bad men.
+Sometimes, however, men were killed in the last desperate conviction
+that no man on earth was as quick as they. What came near being an
+incident of that kind was related by a noted Western sheriff.
+
+"Down on the edge of the Pecos valley," said he, "a dozen miles below
+old Fort Sumner, there used to be a little saloon, and I once captured a
+man there. He came in from somewhere east of our territory, and was
+wanted for murder. The reward offered for him was twelve hundred
+dollars. Since he was a stranger, none of us knew him, but the sheriff's
+descriptions sent in said he had a freckled face, small hands, and a red
+spot in one eye. I heard that there was a new saloon-keeper in there,
+and thought he might be the man, so I took a deputy and went down one
+day to see about it.
+
+"I told my deputy not to shoot until he saw me go after my gun. I didn't
+want to hold the man up unless he was the right one, and I wanted to be
+sure about that identification mark in the eye. Now, when a bartender is
+waiting on you, he will never look you in the face until just as you
+raise your glass to drink. I told my deputy that we would order a couple
+of drinks, and so get a chance to look this fellow in the eye. When he
+looked up, I did look him in the eye, and there was the red spot!
+
+"I dropped my glass and jerked my gun and covered him, but he just
+wouldn't put up his hands for a while. I didn't want to kill him, but I
+thought I surely would have to. He kept both of his hands resting on the
+bar, and I knew he had a gun within three feet of him somewhere. At last
+slowly he gave in. I treated him well, as I always did a prisoner, told
+him we would square it if we had made any mistake. We put irons on him
+and started for Las Vegas with him in a wagon. The next morning, out on
+the trail, he confessed everything to me. We turned him over, and later
+he was tried and hung. I always considered him to be a pretty bad man.
+So far as the result was concerned, he might about as well have gone
+after his gun. I certainly thought that was what he was going to do. He
+had sand. I could just see him stand there and balance the chances in
+his mind.
+
+"Another of the nerviest men I ever ran up against," the same officer
+went on, reflectively, "I met when I was sheriff of Dona Ana county, New
+Mexico. I was in Las Cruces, when there came in a sheriff from over in
+the Indian Nations looking for a fugitive who had broken out of a
+penitentiary after killing a guard and another man or so. This sheriff
+told me that the criminal in question was the most desperate man he had
+ever known, and that no matter how we came on him, he would put up a
+fight and we would have to kill him before we could take him. We located
+our man, who was cooking on a ranch six or eight miles out of town. I
+told the sheriff to stay in town, because the man would know him and
+would not know us. I had a Mexican deputy along with me.
+
+"I put out my deputy on one side of the house and went in. I found my
+man just wiping his hands on a towel after washing his dishes. I threw
+down on him, and he answered by smashing me in the face, and then
+jumping through the window like a squirrel. I caught at him and tore the
+shirt off his back, but I didn't stop him. Then I ran out of the door
+and caught him on the porch. I did not want to kill him, so I struck him
+over the head with the handcuffs I had ready for him. He dropped, but
+came up like a flash, and struck me so hard with his fist that I was
+badly jarred. We fought hammer and tongs for a while, but at length he
+broke away, sprang through the door, and ran down the hall. He was going
+to his room after his gun. At that moment my Mexican came in, and having
+no sentiment about it, just whaled away and shot him in the back,
+killing him on the spot. The doctors said when they examined this man's
+body that he was the most perfect physical specimen they had ever seen.
+I can testify that he was a fighter. The sheriff offered me the reward,
+but I wouldn't take any of it. I told him that I would be over in his
+country some time, and that I was sure he would do as much for me if I
+needed his help. I hope that if I do have to go after his particular
+sort of bad people, I'll be lucky in getting the first start on my man.
+That man was as desperate a fighter as I ever saw or expect to see. Give
+a man of that stripe any kind of a show and he's going to kill you,
+that's all. He knows that he has no chance under the law.
+
+"Sometimes they got away with desperate chances, too, as many a peace
+officer has learned to his cost. The only way to go after such a man is
+to go prepared, and then to give him no earthly show to get the best of
+you. I don't mean that an officer ought to shoot down a man if he has a
+show to take his prisoner alive; but I do mean that he ought to remember
+that he may be pitted against a man who is just as brave as he is,
+and just as good with a gun, and who is fighting for his life."
+
+[Illustration: THE SCENE OF MANY LITTLE WARS
+More men have been killed in this street than in any other in America]
+
+Of course, such a man as this, whether confronted by an officer of the
+law or by another man against whom he has a personal grudge, or who has
+in any way challenged him to the ordeal of weapons, was steadfast in his
+own belief that he was as brave as any, and as quick with weapons. Thus,
+until at length he met his master in the law of human progress and
+civilization, he simply added to his own list of victims, or was added
+to the list of another of his own sort. For a very long time, moreover,
+there existed a great region on the frontier where the law could not
+protect. There was good reason, therefore, for a man's learning to
+depend upon his own courage and strength and skill. He had nothing else
+to protect him, whether he was good or bad. In the typical days of the
+Western bad man, life was the property of the individual, and not of
+society, and one man placed his life against another's as the only way
+of solving hard personal problems. Those days and those conditions
+brought out some of the boldest and most reckless men the earth ever
+saw. Before we freely criticize them, we ought fully to understand them.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+
+The Imitation Desperado--_The Cheap "Long-Hair"_--_A Desperado in
+Appearance, a Coward at Heart_--_Some Desperadoes Who Did Not "Stand the
+Acid."_
+
+
+The counterfeit bad man, in so far as he has a place in literature, was
+largely produced by Western consumptives for Eastern consumption.
+Sometimes he was in person manufactured in the East and sent West. It is
+easy to see the philosophical difference between the actual bad man of
+the West and the imitation article. The bad man was an evolution; the
+imitation bad man was an instantaneous creation, a supply arising full
+panoplied to fill a popular demand. Silently there arose, partly in the
+West and partly in the East, men who gravely and calmly proceeded to
+look the part. After looking the part for a time, to their own
+satisfaction at least, and after taking themselves seriously as
+befitted the situation, they, in very many instances, faded away and
+disappeared in that Nowhere whence they came. Some of them took
+themselves too seriously for their own good. Of course, there existed
+for some years certain possibilities that any one of these bad men might
+run against the real thing.
+
+There always existed in the real, sober, level-headed West a contempt
+for the West-struck man who was not really bad, but who wanted to seem
+"bad." Singularly enough, men of this type were not so frequently local
+products as immigrants. The "bootblack bad man" was a character
+recognized on the frontier--the city tough gone West with ambitions to
+achieve a bad eminence. Some of these men were partially bad for a
+while. Some of them, no doubt, even left behind them, after their sudden
+funerals, the impression that they had been wholly bad. You cannot
+detect all the counterfeit currency in the world, severe as the test for
+counterfeits was in the old West. There is, of course, no great amount
+of difference between the West and the East. All America, as well as the
+West, demanded of its citizens nothing so much as genuineness. Yet the
+Western phrase, to "stand the acid," was not surpassed in graphic
+descriptiveness. When an imitation bad man came into a town of the old
+frontier, he had to "stand the acid" or get out. His hand would be
+called by some one. "My friend," said old Bob Bobo, the famous
+Mississippi bear hunter, to a man who was doing some pretty loud
+talking, "I have always noticed that when a man goes out hunting for
+trouble in these bottoms, he almost always finds it." Two weeks later,
+this same loud talker threatened a calm man in simple jeans pants, who
+took a shotgun and slew him impulsively. Now, the West got its hot blood
+largely from the South, and the dogma of the Southern town was the same
+in the Western mining town or cow camp--the bad man or the would-be bad
+man had to declare himself before long, and the acid bottle was always
+close at hand.
+
+That there were grades in counterfeit bad men was accepted as a truth on
+the frontier. A man might be known as dangerous, as a murderer at heart,
+and yet be despised. The imitation bad man discovered that it is
+comparatively easy to terrify a good part of the population of a
+community. Sometimes a base imitation of a desperado is exalted in the
+public eye as the real article. A few years ago four misled hoodlums of
+Chicago held up a street-car barn, killed two men, stole a sum of money,
+killed a policeman and another man, and took refuge in a dugout in the
+sand hills below the city, comporting themselves according to the most
+accepted dime-novel standards. Clumsily arrested by one hundred men or
+so, instead of being tidily killed by three or four, as would have been
+the case on the frontier, they were put in jail, given columns of
+newspaper notice, and worshiped by large crowds of maudlin individuals.
+These men probably died in the belief that they were "bad." They were
+not bad men, but imitations, counterfeit, and, indeed, nothing more than
+cheap and dirty little murderers.
+
+Of course, we all feel able to detect the mere notoriety hunter, who
+poses about in cheap pretentiousness; but now and then in the West there
+turned up something more difficult to understand. Perhaps the most
+typical case of imitation bad man ever known, at least in the Southwest,
+was Bob Ollinger, who was killed by Billy the Kid in 1881, when the
+latter escaped from jail at Lincoln, New Mexico. That Ollinger was a
+killer had been proved beyond the possibility of a doubt. He had no
+respect for human life, and those who knew him best knew that he was a
+murderer at heart. His reputation was gained otherwise than through the
+severe test of an "even break." Some say that he killed Chavez, a
+Mexican, as he offered his own hand in greeting. He killed another man,
+Hill, in a similarly treacherous way. Later, when, as a peace officer,
+he was with a deputy, Pierce, serving a warrant on one Jones, he pulled
+his gun and, without need or provocation, shot Jones through. The same
+bullet, passing through Jones's body, struck Pierce in the leg and left
+him a cripple for life. Again, Ollinger was out as a deputy with a noted
+sheriff in pursuit of a Mexican criminal, who had taken refuge in a
+ditch. Ollinger wanted only to get into a position where he could shoot
+the man, but his superior officer crawled alone up the ditch, and,
+rising suddenly, covered his man and ordered him to surrender. The
+Mexican threw down his gun and said that he would surrender to the
+sheriff, but that he was sure Ollinger would kill him. This fear was
+justified. "When I brought out the man," said the sheriff, "Ollinger
+came up on the run, with his cocked six-shooter in his hand. His long
+hair was flying behind him as he ran, and I never in my life saw so
+devilish a look on any human being's face. He simply wanted to shoot
+that Mexican, and he chased him around me until I had to tell him I
+would kill him if he did not stop." "Ollinger was a born murderer at
+heart," the sheriff added later. "I never slept out with him that I did
+not watch him. After I had more of a reputation, I think Ollinger would
+have been glad to kill me for the notoriety of it. I never gave him a
+chance to shoot me in the back or when I was asleep. Of course, you will
+understand that we had to use for deputies such material as we could
+get."
+
+Ollinger was the sort of imitation desperado that looks the part. He
+wore his hair long and affected the ultra-Western dress, which to-day is
+despised in the West. He was one of the very few men at that
+time--twenty-five years ago--who carried a knife at his belt. When he
+was in such a town as Las Vegas or Sante Fe, he delighted to put on a
+buckskin shirt, spread his hair out on his shoulders, and to walk
+through the streets, picking his teeth with his knife, or once in a
+while throwing it in such a way that it would stick up in a tree or a
+board. He presented an eye-filling spectacle, and was indeed the ideal
+imitation bad man. This being the case, there may be interest in
+following out his life to its close, and in noting how the bearing of
+the bad man's title sometimes exacted a very high price of the claimant.
+
+Ollinger, who had made many threats against Billy the Kid, was very
+cordially hated by the latter. Together with Deputy Bell, of White Oaks,
+Ollinger had been appointed to guard the Kid for two weeks previous to
+the execution of the death sentence which had been imposed upon the
+latter. The Kid did not want to harm Bell, but he dearly hated Ollinger,
+who never had lost an opportunity to taunt him. Watching his chance, the
+Kid at length killed both Bell and Ollinger, shooting the latter with
+Ollinger's own shotgun, with which Ollinger had often menaced his
+prisoner.
+
+Other than these two men, the Kid and Ollinger, I know of no better
+types each of his own class. One was a genuine bad man, and the other
+was the genuine imitation of a bad man. They were really as far apart as
+the poles, and they are so held in the tradition of that bloody country
+to-day. Throughout the West there are two sorts of wolves--the coyote
+and the gray wolf. Either will kill, and both are lovers of blood. One
+is yellow at heart, and the other is game all the way through. In
+outward appearance both are wolves, and in appearance they sometimes
+grade toward each other so closely that it is hard to determine the
+species. The gray wolf is a warrior and is respected. The coyote is a
+sneak and a murderer, and his name is a term of reproach throughout the
+West.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+
+The Land of the Desperado--_The Frontier of the Old West_--_The Great
+Unsettled Regions_--_The Desperado of the Mountains_--_His Brother of
+the Plains_--_The Desperado of the Early Railroad Towns_.
+
+
+There was once a vast empire, almost unknown, west of the Missouri
+river. The white civilization of this continent was three hundred years
+in reaching it. We had won our independence and taken our place among
+the nations of the world before our hardiest men had learned anything
+whatever of this Western empire. We had bought this vast region and were
+paying for it before we knew what we had purchased. The wise men of the
+East, leading men in Congress, said that it would be criminal to add
+this territory to our already huge domain, because it could never be
+settled. It was not dreamed that civilization would ever really subdue
+it. Even much later, men as able as Daniel Webster deplored the attempt
+to extend our lines farther to the West, saying that these territories
+could not be States, that the East would suffer if we widened our West,
+and that the latter could never be of value to the union! So far as this
+great West was concerned, it was spurned and held in contempt, and it
+had full right to take itself as an outcast. Decreed to the wilderness
+forever, it could have been forgiven for running wild. Denominated as
+unfit for the occupation of the Eastern population, it might have been
+expected that it would gather to itself a population all its own.
+
+It did gather such a population, and in part that population was a
+lawless one. The frontier, clear across to the Pacific, has at one time
+or another been lawless; but this was not always the fault of the men
+who occupied the frontier. The latter swept Westward with such
+unexampled swiftness that the machinery of the law could not always keep
+up with them. Where there are no courts, where each man is judge and
+jury for himself, protecting himself and his property by his own arm
+alone, there always have gathered also the lawless, those who do not
+wish the day of law to come, men who want license and not liberty, who
+wish crime and not lawfulness, who want to take what is not theirs and
+to enforce their own will in their own fashion.
+
+"There are two states of society perhaps equally bad for the promotion
+of good morals and virtue--the densely populated city and the
+wilderness. In the former, a single individual loses his identity in the
+mass, and, being unnoticed, is without the view of the public, and can,
+to a certain extent, commit crimes with impunity. In the latter, the
+population is sparse and, the strong arm of the law not being extended,
+his crimes are in a measure unobserved, or, if so, frequently power is
+wanting to bring him to justice. Hence, both are the resort of
+desperadoes. In the early settlement of the West, the borders were
+infested with desperadoes flying from justice, suspected or convicted
+felons escaped from the grasp of the law, who sought safety. The
+counterfeiter and the robber there found a secure retreat or a new
+theater for crime."
+
+The foregoing words were written in 1855 by a historian to whom the West
+of the trans-Missouri remained still a sealed book; but they cover very
+fitly the appeal of a wild and unknown land to a bold, a criminal, or
+an adventurous population. Of the trans-Missouri as we of to-day think
+of it, no one can write more accurately and understandingly than
+Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States, who thus describes
+the land he knew and loved.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: "The Wilderness Hunters." G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York and
+London.]
+
+     "Some distance beyond the Mississippi, stretching from Texas to
+     North Dakota, and westward to the Rocky mountains, lies the plains
+     country. This is a region of light rainfall, where the ground is
+     clad with short grass, while cottonwood trees fringe the courses of
+     the winding plains streams; streams that are alternately turbid
+     torrents and mere dwindling threads of water. The great stretches
+     of natural pasture are broken by gray sage-brush plains, and tracts
+     of strangely shaped and colored Bad Lands; sun-scorched wastes in
+     summer, and in winter arctic in their iron desolation. Beyond the
+     plains rise the Rocky mountains, their flanks covered with
+     coniferous woods; but the trees are small, and do not ordinarily
+     grow very close together. Toward the north the forest becomes
+     denser, and the peaks higher; and glaciers creep down toward the
+     valleys from the fields of everlasting snow. The brooks are
+     brawling, trout-filled torrents; the swift rivers roam over rapid
+     and cataract, on their way to one or other of the two great oceans.
+
+     "Southwest of the Rockies evil and terrible deserts stretch for
+     leagues and leagues, mere waterless wastes of sandy plain and
+     barren mountain, broken here and there by narrow strips of fertile
+     ground. Rain rarely falls, and there are no clouds to dim the
+     brazen sun. The rivers run in deep canyons, or are swallowed by the
+     burning sand; the smaller watercourses are dry throughout the
+     greater part of the year.
+
+     "Beyond this desert region rise the sunny Sierras of California,
+     with their flower-clad slopes and groves of giant trees; and north
+     of them, along the coast, the rain-shrouded mountain chains of
+     Oregon and Washington, matted with the towering growth of the
+     mighty evergreen forest."
+
+Such, then, was this Western land, so long the home of the out-dweller
+who foreran civilization, and who sometimes took matters of the law into
+his own hands. For purposes of convenience, we may classify him as the
+bad man of the mountains and the bad man of the plains; because he was
+usually found in and around the crude localities where raw resources in
+property were being developed; and because, previous to the advent of
+agriculture, the two vast wilderness resources were minerals and cattle.
+The mines of California and the Rockies; the cattle of the great
+plains--write the story of these and you have much of the story of
+Western desperadoism. For, in spite of the fact that the ideal desperado
+was one who did not rob or kill for gain, the most usual form of early
+desperadoism had to do with attempts at unlawfully acquiring another
+man's property.
+
+The discovery of gold in California caused a flood of bold men, good and
+bad, to pour into that remote region from all corners of the earth.
+Books could be written, and have been written, on the days of terror in
+California, when the Vigilantes took the law into their own hands. There
+came the time later when the rich placers of Montana and other
+territories were pouring out a stream of gold rivaling that of the days
+of '49; and when a tide of restless and reckless characters, resigning
+or escaping from both armies in the Civil War, mingled with many others
+who heard also the imperious call of a land of gold, and rolled
+westward across the plains by every means of conveyance or locomotion
+then possible to man.
+
+The next great days of the wild West were the cattle days, which also
+reached their height soon after the end of the great war, when the North
+was seeking new lands for its young men, and the Southwest was hunting
+an outlet for the cattle herds, which had enormously multiplied while
+their owners were off at the wars. The cattle country had been passed
+over unnoticed by the mining men for many years, and dismissed as the
+Great American Desert, as it had been named by the first explorers, who
+were almost as ignorant about the West as Daniel Webster himself. Into
+this once barren land, a vast region unsettled and without law, there
+now came pouring up the great herds of cattle from the South, in charge
+of men wild as the horned kine they drove. Here was another great wild
+land that drew, as a magnet, wild men from all parts of the country.
+
+This last home of the bad man, the old cattle range, is covered by a
+passage from an earlier work:[B]
+
+     "The braiding of a hundred minor pathways, the Long Trail lay like
+     a vast rope connecting the cattle country of the South with that of
+     the North. Lying loose or coiling, it ran for more than two
+     thousand miles along the eastern ridge of the Rocky mountains,
+     sometimes close in at their feet, again hundreds of miles away
+     across the hard table-lands or the well-flowered prairies. It
+     traversed in a fair line the vast land of Texas, curled over the
+     Indian Nations, over Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming and
+     Montana, and bent in wide overlapping circles as far west as Utah
+     and Nevada; as far east as Missouri, Iowa, Illinois; and as far
+     north as the British possessions. Even to-day you may trace plainly
+     its former course, from its faint beginnings in the lazy land of
+     Mexico, the Ararat of the cattle range. It is distinct across
+     Texas, and multifold still in the Indian lands. Its many
+     intermingling paths still scar the iron surface of the Neutral
+     Strip, and the plows have not buried all the old furrows in the
+     plains of Kansas. Parts of the path still remain visible in the
+     mountain lands of the far North. You may see the ribbons banding
+     the hillsides to-day along the valley of the Stillwater, and along
+     the Yellowstone and toward the source of the Missouri. The hoof
+     marks are beyond the Musselshell, over the Bad Lands and the
+     _coulees_ and the flat prairies; and far up into the land of the
+     long cold you may see, even to-day if you like, the shadow of that
+     unparalleled pathway, the Long Trail of the cattle range. History
+     has no other like it.
+
+     "This was really the dawning of the American cattle industry. The
+     Long Trail now received a gradual but unmistakable extension,
+     always to the north, and along the line of the intermingling of the
+     products of the Spanish and the Anglo-Saxon civilizations. The
+     thrust was always to the north. Chips and flakes of the great
+     Southwestern herd began to be seen in the northern states. Meantime
+     the Anglo-Saxon civilization was rolling swiftly toward the upper
+     West. The Indians were being driven from the plains. A solid army
+     was pressing behind the vanguard of soldier, scout and plainsman.
+     The railroads were pushing out into a new and untracked empire. In
+     1871 over six hundred thousand cattle crossed the Red river for the
+     Northern markets. Abilene, Newton, Wichita, Ellsworth, Great Bend,
+     "Dodge," flared out into a swift and sometime evil blossoming. The
+     Long Trail, which long ago had found the black corn lands of
+     Illinois and Missouri, now crowded to the West, until it had
+     reached Utah and Nevada, and penetrated every open park and _mesa_
+     and valley of Colorado, and found all the high plains of Wyoming.
+     Cheyenne and Laramie became common words now, and drovers spoke
+     wisely of the dangers of the Platte as a year before they had
+     mentioned those of the Red river or the Arkansas. Nor did the Trail
+     pause in its irresistible push to the north until it had found the
+     last of the five great trans-continental lines, far in the British
+     provinces. The Long Trail of the cattle range was done. By magic
+     the cattle industry had spread over the entire West."
+
+[Footnote B: "The Story of the Cowboy," by E. Hough. D. Appleton & Co.,
+New York.]
+
+By magic, also, the cattle industry called to itself a population unique
+and peculiar. Here were great values to be handled and guarded. The
+cowboy appeared, summoned out of the shadows by the demand of evolution.
+With him appeared also the cattle thief, making his living on free beef,
+as he had once on the free buffalo of the plains. The immense domain of
+the West was filled with property held under no better or more obvious
+mark than the imprint of a hot iron on the hide. There were no fences.
+The owner might be a thousand miles away. The temptation to theft was
+continual and urgent. It seemed easy and natural to take a living from
+these great herds which no one seemed to own or to care for. The
+"rustler" of the range made his appearance, bold, hardy, unprincipled;
+and the story of his undoing by the law is precisely that of the finish
+of the robbers of the mines by the Vigilantes.
+
+Now, too, came the days of transition, which have utterly changed all
+the West. The railroad sprang across this great middle country of the
+plains. The intent was to connect the two sides of this continent; but,
+incidentally, and more swiftly than was planned, there was builded a
+great midway empire on the plains, now one of the grandest portions of
+America.
+
+This building of the trans-continental lines was a rude and dangerous
+work. It took out into the West mobs of hard characters, not afraid of
+hard work and hard living. These men would have a certain amount of
+money as wages, and would assuredly spend these wages as they made them;
+hence, the gambler followed the rough settlements at the "head of the
+rails." The murderer, the thief, the prostitute, the social outcast and
+the fleeing criminal went with the gamblers and the toughs. Those were
+the days when it was not polite to ask a man what his name had been
+back in the States. A very large percentage of this population was wild
+and lawless, and it impressed those who joined it instead of being
+altered and improved by them. There were no wilder days in the West than
+those of the early railroad building. Such towns as Newton, Kansas,
+where eleven men were killed in one night; Fort Dodge, where armed
+encounters among cowboys and gamblers, deputies and desperadoes, were
+too frequent to attract attention; Caldwell, on the Indian border; Hays
+City, Abilene, Ellsworth--any of a dozen cow camps, where the head of
+the rails caught the great northern cattle drives, furnished chapters
+lurid enough to take volumes in telling--indeed, perhaps, gave that
+stamp to the West which has been apparently so ineradicable.
+
+These were flourishing times for the Western desperado, and he became
+famous, and, as it were, typical, at about this era. Perhaps this was
+due in part to the fact that the railroads carried with them the
+telegraph and the newspaper, so that records and reports were made of
+what had for many years gone unreported. Now, too, began the influx of
+transients, who saw the wild West hurriedly and wrote of it as a
+strange and dangerous country. The wild citizens of California and
+Montana in mining days passed almost unnoticed except in fiction. The
+wild men of the middle plains now began to have a record in facts, or
+partial facts, as brought to the notice of the reading public which was
+seeking news of the new lands. A strange and turbulent day now drew
+swiftly on.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+
+The Early Outlaw--_The Frontier of the Past Century_--_The Bad Man East
+of the Mississippi River_--_The Great Western Land-Pirate, John A.
+Murrell_--_The Greatest Slave Insurrection Ever Planned_.
+
+
+Before passing to the review of the more modern days of wild life on the
+Western frontier, we shall find it interesting to note a period less
+known, but quite as wild and desperate as any of later times. Indeed, we
+might also say that our own desperadoes could take lessons from their
+ancestors of the past generation who lived in the forests of the
+Mississippi valley.
+
+Those were the days when the South was breaking over the Appalachians
+and exploring the middle and lower West. Adventurers were dropping down
+the old river roads and "traces" across Kentucky, Tennessee, and
+Mississippi, into Louisiana and Texas. The flatboat and keel-boat days
+of the great rivers were at their height, and the population was in
+large part transient, migratory, and bold; perhaps holding a larger per
+cent. of criminals than any Western population since could claim. There
+were no organized systems of common carriers, no accepted roads and
+highways. The great National Road, from Wheeling west across Ohio,
+paused midway of Indiana. Stretching for hundreds of miles in each
+direction was the wilderness, wherein man had always been obliged to
+fend for himself. And, as ever, the wilderness had its own wild deeds.
+Flatboats were halted and robbed; caravans of travelers were attacked;
+lonely wayfarers plodding on horseback were waylaid and murdered. In
+short, the story of that early day shows our first frontiersman no
+novice in crime.
+
+About twenty miles below the mouth of the Wabash river, there was a
+resort of robbers such as might belong to the most lurid dime-novel
+list--the famous Cave-in-the-Rock, in the bank of the Ohio river. This
+cavern was about twenty-five feet in height at its visible opening, and
+it ran back into the bluff two hundred feet, with a width of eighty
+feet. The floor of this natural cavern was fairly flat, so that it
+could be used as a habitation. From this lower cave a sort of aperture
+led up to a second one, immediately above it in the bluff wall, and
+these two natural retreats of wild animals offered attractions to wild
+men which were not unaccepted. It was here that there dwelt for some
+time the famous robber Meason, or Mason, who terrorized the flatboat
+trade of the Ohio at about 1800. Meason was a robber king, a giant in
+stature, and a man of no ordinary brains. He had associated with him his
+two sons and a few other hard characters, who together made a band
+sufficiently strong to attack any party of the size usually making up
+the boat companies of that time, or the average family traveling,
+mounted or on foot, through the forest-covered country of the Ohio
+valley. Meason killed and pillaged pretty much as he liked for a term of
+years, but as travel became too general along the Ohio, he removed to
+the wilder country south of that stream, and began to operate on the old
+"Natchez and Nashville Trace," one of the roadways of the South at that
+time, when the Indian lands were just opening to the early settlers.
+Lower Tennessee and pretty much all of Mississippi made his
+stamping-grounds, and his name became a terror there, as it had been
+along the Ohio. The governor of the State of Mississippi offered a
+reward for his capture, dead or alive; but for a long time he escaped
+all efforts at apprehension. Treachery did the work, as it has usually
+in bringing such bold and dangerous men to book. Two members of his gang
+proved traitors to their chief. Seizing an opportunity they crept behind
+him and drove a tomahawk into his brain. They cut off the head and took
+it along as proof; but as they were displaying this at the seat of
+government, the town of Washington, they themselves were recognized and
+arrested, and were later tried and executed; which ended the Meason
+gang, one of the early and once famous desperado bands.
+
+[Illustration: TYPES OF BORDER BARRICADES]
+
+From the earliest days there have been border counterfeiters of coin.
+One of the first and most remarkable was the noted Sturdevant, who lived
+in lower Illinois, near the Ohio river, in the first quarter of the last
+century. Sturdevant was also something of a robber king, for he could at
+any time wind his horn and summon to his side a hundred armed men. He
+was ostensibly a steady farmer, and lived comfortably, with a good corps
+of servants and tenants about him; but his ablest assistants did not
+dwell so close to him. He had an army of confederates all over the
+middle West and South, and issued more counterfeit money than any man
+before, and probably than any man since. He always exacted a regular
+price for his money--sixteen dollars for a hundred in counterfeit--and
+such was the looseness of currency matters at that time that he found
+many willing to take a chance in his trade. He never allowed any
+confederate to pass a counterfeit bill in his own state, or in any other
+way to bring himself under the surveillance of local law; and they were
+all obliged to be especially circumspect in the county where they lived.
+He was a very smug sort of villain, in the trade strictly for revenue,
+and he was so careful that he was never caught by the law, in spite of
+the fact that it was known that his farm was the source of a flood of
+spurious money. He was finally "regulated" by the citizens, who arose
+and made him leave the country. This was one of the early applications
+of lynch law in the West. Its results were, as usual, salutary. There
+was no more counterfeiting in that region.
+
+A very noted desperado of these early days was Harpe, or Big Harpe, as
+he was called, to distinguish him from his brother and associate,
+Little Harpe. Big Harpe made a wide region of the Ohio valley dangerous
+to travelers. The events connected with his vicious life are thus given
+by that always interesting old-time chronicler, Henry Howe:
+
+     "In the fall of the year 1801 or 1802, a company consisting of two
+     men and three women arrived in Lincoln county, Ky., and encamped
+     about a mile from the present town of Stanford. The appearance of
+     the individuals composing this party was wild and rude in the
+     extreme. The one who seemed to be the leader of the band was above
+     the ordinary stature of men. His frame was bony and muscular, his
+     breast broad, his limbs gigantic. His clothing was uncouth and
+     shabby, his exterior weather-beaten and dirty, indicating continual
+     exposure to the elements, and designating him as one who dwelt far
+     from the habitations of men, and mingled not in the courtesies of
+     civilized life. His countenance was bold and ferocious, and
+     exceedingly repulsive, from its strongly marked expression of
+     villainy. His face, which was larger than ordinary, exhibited the
+     lines of ungovernable passion, and the complexion announced that
+     the ordinary feelings of the human breast were in him
+     extinguished. Instead of the healthy hue which indicates the social
+     emotions, there was a livid, unnatural redness, resembling that of
+     a dried and lifeless skin. His eye was fearless and steady, but it
+     was also artful and audacious, glaring upon the beholder with an
+     unpleasant fixedness and brilliancy, like that of a ravenous animal
+     gloating on its prey. He wore no covering on his head, and the
+     natural protection of thick, coarse hair, of a fiery redness,
+     uncombed and matted, gave evidence of long exposure to the rudest
+     visitations of the sunbeam and the tempest. He was armed with a
+     rifle, and a broad leathern belt, drawn closely around his waist,
+     supported a knife and a tomahawk. He seemed, in short, an outlaw,
+     destitute of all the nobler sympathies of human nature, and
+     prepared at all points of assault or defense. The other man was
+     smaller in size than him who lead the party, but similarly armed,
+     having the same suspicious exterior, and a countenance equally
+     fierce and sinister. The females were coarse and wretchedly
+     attired.
+
+     "These men stated in answer to the inquiry of the inhabitants, that
+     their name was Harpe, and that they were emigrants from North
+     Carolina. They remained at their encampment the greater part of
+     two days and a night, spending the time in rioting, drunkenness and
+     debauchery. When they left, they took the road leading to Green
+     river. The day succeeding their departure, a report reached the
+     neighborhood that a young gentleman of wealth from Virginia, named
+     Lankford, had been robbed and murdered on what was then called and
+     is still known as the "Wilderness Road," which runs through the
+     Rock-castle hills. Suspicion immediately fixed upon the Harpes as
+     the perpetrators, and Captain Ballenger at the head of a few bold
+     and resolute men, started in pursuit. They experienced great
+     difficulty in following their trail, owing to a heavy fall of snow,
+     which obliterated most of their tracks, but finally came upon them
+     while encamped in a bottom on Green river, near the spot where the
+     town of Liberty now stands. At first they made a show of
+     resistance, but upon being informed that if they did not
+     immediately surrender, they would be shot down, they yielded
+     themselves prisoners. They were brought back to Stanford, and there
+     examined. Among their effects were found some fine linen shirts,
+     marked with the initials of Lankford. One had been pierced by a
+     bullet and was stained with blood. They had also a considerable
+     sum of money in gold. It was afterward ascertained that this was
+     the kind of money Lankford had with him. The evidence against them
+     being thus conclusive, they were confined in the Stanford jail, but
+     were afterward sent for trial to Danville, where the district court
+     was in session. Here they broke jail, and succeeded in making their
+     escape.
+
+     "They were next heard of in Adair county, near Columbia. In passing
+     through the country, they met a small boy, the son of Colonel
+     Trabue, with a pillow-case of meal or flour, an article they
+     probably needed. This boy, it is supposed they robbed and then
+     murdered, as he was never afterward heard of. Many years afterward
+     human bones answering the size of Colonel Trabue's son at the time
+     of his disappearance, were found in a sink hole near the place
+     where he was said to have been murdered.
+
+     "The Harpes still shaped their course toward the mouth of Green
+     river, marking their path by murders and robberies of the most
+     horrible and brutal character. The district of country through
+     which they passed was at that time very thinly settled, and from
+     this reason, their outrages went unpunished. They seemed inspired
+     with the deadliest hatred against the whole human race, and such
+     was their implacable misanthropy, that they were known to kill
+     where there was no temptation to rob. One of their victims was a
+     little girl, found at some distance from her home, whose tender age
+     and helplessness would have been protection against any but
+     incarnate fiends. The last dreadful act of barbarity, which led to
+     their punishment and expulsion from the country, exceeded in
+     atrocity all the others.
+
+     "Assuming the guise of Methodist preachers, they obtained lodgings
+     one night at a solitary house on the road. Mr. Stagall, the master
+     of the house, was absent, but they found his wife and children, and
+     a stranger, who, like themselves, had stopped for the night. Here
+     they conversed and made inquiries about the two noted Harpes who
+     were represented as prowling about the country. When they retired
+     to rest, they contrived to secure an axe, which they carried with
+     them into their chamber. In the dead of night, they crept softly
+     down stairs, and assassinated the whole family, together with the
+     stranger, in their sleep, and then setting fire to the house, made
+     their escape. When Stagall returned, he found no wife to welcome
+     him; no home to receive him. Distracted with grief and rage, he
+     turned his horse's head from the smoldering ruins, and repaired to
+     the house of Captain John Leeper. Leeper was one of the most
+     powerful men in his day, and fearless as powerful. Collecting four
+     or five men well armed, they mounted and started in pursuit of
+     vengeance. It was agreed that Leeper should attack 'Big Harpe,'
+     leaving 'Little Harpe' to be disposed of by Stagall. The others
+     were to hold themselves in readiness to assist Leeper and Stagall,
+     as circumstances might require.
+
+     "This party found the women belonging to the Harpes, attending to
+     their little camp by the roadside; the men having gone aside into
+     the woods to shoot an unfortunate traveler, of the name of Smith,
+     who had fallen into their hands, and whom the women had begged
+     might not be dispatched before their eyes. It was this halt that
+     enabled the pursuers to overtake them. The women immediately gave
+     the alarm, and the miscreants mounting their horses, which were
+     large, fleet and powerful, fled in separate directions. Leeper
+     singled out the 'Big Harpe,' and being better mounted than his
+     companions, soon left them far behind. 'Little Harpe' succeeded in
+     escaping from Stagall, and he, with the rest of his companions,
+     turned and followed on the track of Leeper and the 'Big Harpe.'
+     After a chase of about nine miles, Leeper came within gun-shot of
+     the latter and fired. The ball entering his thigh, passed through
+     it and penetrated his horse and both fell. Harpe's gun escaped from
+     his hand and rolled some eight or ten feet down the bank. Reloading
+     his rifle, Leeper ran to where the wounded outlaw lay weltering in
+     his blood, and found him with one thigh broken, and the other
+     crushed beneath his horse. Leeper rolled the horse away, and set
+     Harpe in an easier position. The robber begged that he might not be
+     killed. Leeper told him that he had nothing to fear from him, but
+     that Stagall was coming up, and could not probably be restrained.
+     Harpe appeared very much frightened at hearing this, and implored
+     Leeper to protect him. In a few moments, Stagall appeared, and
+     without uttering a word, raised his rifle and shot Harpe through
+     the head. They then severed the head from the body, and stuck it
+     upon a pole where the road crosses the creek, from which the place
+     was then named and is yet called Harpe's Head. Thus perished one of
+     the boldest and most noted freebooters that has ever appeared in
+     America. Save courage, he was without one redeeming quality, and
+     his death freed the country from a terror which had long paralyzed
+     its boldest spirits.
+
+     "The 'Little Harpe' afterward joined the band of Meason, and became
+     one of his most valuable assistants in the dreadful trade of
+     robbery and murder. He was one of the two bandits that, tempted by
+     the reward for their leader's head, murdered him, and eventually
+     themselves suffered the penalty of the law as previously related."
+
+Thus it would seem that the first quarter of the last century on the
+frontier was not without its own interest. The next decade, or that
+ending about 1840, however, offered a still greater instance of
+outlawry, one of the most famous ones indeed of American history,
+although little known to-day. This had to do with that genius in crime,
+John A. Murrell, long known as the great Western land-pirate; and surely
+no pirate of the seas was ever more enterprising or more dangerous.
+
+Murrell was another man who, in a decent walk of life, would have been
+called great. He had more than ordinary energy and intellect. He was not
+a mere brute, but a shrewd, cunning, scheming man, hesitating at no
+crime on earth, yet animated by a mind so bold that mere personal crime
+was not enough for him. When it is added that he had a gang of robbers
+and murderers associated with him who were said to number nearly two
+thousand men, and who were scattered over the entire South below the
+Ohio river, it may be seen how bold were his plans; and his ability may
+further be shown in the fact that for years these men lived among and
+mingled with their fellows in civil life, unknown and unsuspected. Some
+of them were said to have been of the best families of the land; and
+even yet there come to light strange and romantic tales, perhaps not
+wholly true, of death-bed confessions of men prominent in the South who
+admitted that once they belonged to Murrell's gang, but had later
+repented and reformed. A prominent Kentucky lawyer was one of these.
+
+Murrell and his confederates would steal horses and mules, or at least
+the common class, or division, known as the "strikers," would do so,
+although the members of the Grand Council would hardly stoop to so petty
+a crime. For them was reserved the murdering of travelers or settlers
+who were supposed to have money, and the larger operations of negro
+stealing.
+
+The theft of slaves, the claiming of the runaway rewards, the later
+re-stealing and re-selling and final killing of the negro in order to
+destroy the evidence, are matters which Murrell reduced to a system that
+has no parallel in the criminal records of the country. But not even
+here did this daring outlaw pause. It was not enough to steal a negro
+here and there, and to make a few thousand dollars out of each negro so
+handled. The whole state of organized society was to be overthrown by
+means of this same black population. So at least goes one story of his
+life. We know of several so-called black insurrections that were planned
+at one time or another in the South--as, for instance, the Turner
+insurrection in Virginia; but this Murrell enterprise was the biggest of
+them all.
+
+The plan was to have the uprising occur all over the South on the same
+day, Christmas of 1835. The blacks were to band together and march on
+the settlements, after killing all the whites on the farms where they
+worked. There they were to fall under the leadership of Murrell's
+lieutenants, who were to show them how to sack the stores, to kill the
+white merchants, and take the white women. The banks of all the Southern
+towns were to become the property of Murrell and his associates. In
+short, at one stroke, the entire system of government, which had been
+established after such hard effort in that fierce wilderness along the
+old Southern "traces," was to be wiped out absolutely. The land was
+indeed to be left without law. The entire fruits of organized society
+were to belong to a band of outlaws. This was probably the best and
+boldest instance ever seen of the narrowness of the line dividing
+society and savagery.
+
+Murrell was finally brought to book by his supposed confederate, Virgil
+A. Stewart, the spy, who went under the name of Hues, whose evidence,
+after many difficulties, no doubt resulted in the breaking up of this,
+the largest and most dangerous band of outlaws this country ever saw;
+although Stewart himself was a vain and ambitious notoriety seeker.
+Supposing himself safe, Murrell gave Stewart a detailed story of his
+life. This was later used in evidence against him; and although
+Stewart's account needs qualification, it is the best and fullest record
+obtainable to-day.[C]
+
+[Footnote C: "Life and Adventures of Virgil A. Stewart." Harper and
+Brothers, New York. 1836.]
+
+"I was born in Middle Tennessee," Murrell personally stated. "My
+parents had not much property, but they were intelligent people; and my
+father was an honest man I expect, and tried to raise me honest, but I
+think none the better of him for that. My mother was of the pure grit;
+she learned me and all her children to steal as soon as we could walk
+and would hide for us whenever she could. At ten years old I was not a
+bad hand. The first good haul I made was from a pedler who lodged at my
+father's house one night.
+
+"I began to look after larger spoils and ran several fine horses. By the
+time I was twenty I began to acquire considerable character, and
+concluded to go off and do my speculation where I was not known, and go
+on a larger scale; so I began to see the value of having friends in this
+business. I made several associates; I had been acquainted with some old
+hands for a long time, who had given me the names of some royal fellows
+between Nashville and Tuscaloosa, and between Nashville and Savannah in
+the state of Georgia and many other places. Myself and a fellow by the
+name of Crenshaw gathered four good horses and started for Georgia. We
+got in company with a young South Carolinian just before we reached
+Cumberland Mountain, and Crenshaw soon knew all about his business. He
+had been to Tennessee to buy a drove of hogs, but when he got there pork
+was dearer than he calculated, and he declined purchasing. We concluded
+he was a prize. Crenshaw winked at me; I understood his idea. Crenshaw
+had traveled the road before, but I never had; we had traveled several
+miles on the mountain, when we passed near a great precipice; just
+before we passed it, Crenshaw asked me for my whip, which had a pound of
+lead in the butt; I handed it to him, and he rode up by the side of the
+South Carolinian, and gave him a blow on the side of the head, and
+tumbled him from his horse; we lit from our horses and fingered his
+pockets; we got twelve hundred and sixty-two dollars. Crenshaw said he
+knew of a place to hide him, and gathered him under the arms, and I by
+his feet, and conveyed him to a deep crevice in the brow of the
+precipice, and tumbled him into it; he went out of sight. We then
+tumbled in his saddle, and took his horse with us, which was worth two
+hundred dollars. We turned our course for South Alabama, and sold our
+horse for a good price. We frolicked for a week or more and were the
+highest larks you ever saw. We commenced sporting and gambling, and
+lost every cent of our money.
+
+"We were forced to resort to our profession for a second raise. We stole
+a negro man, and pushed for Mississippi. We had promised him that we
+would conduct him to a free state if he would let us sell him once as we
+went on our way; we also agreed to give him part of the money. We sold
+him for six hundred dollars; but, when we went to start, the negro
+seemed to be very uneasy, and appeared to doubt our coming back for him
+as we had promised. We lay in a creek bottom, not far from the place
+where we had sold the negro, all the next day, and after dark we went to
+the china-tree in the lane where we were to meet Tom; he had been
+waiting for some time. He mounted his horse, and we pushed with him a
+second time. We rode twenty miles that night to the house of a friendly
+speculator. I had seen him in Tennessee, and had given him several
+lifts. He gave me his place of residence, that I might find him when I
+was passing. He is quite rich, and one of the best kind of fellows. Our
+horses were fed as much as they would eat, and two of them were
+foundered the next morning. We were detained a few days, and during that
+time our friend went to a little village in the neighborhood, and saw
+the negro advertised, with a description of the two men of whom he had
+been purchased, and with mention of them as suspicious personages. It
+was rather squally times, but any port in a storm; we took the negro
+that night to the bank of a creek which runs by the farm of our friend,
+and Crenshaw shot him through the head. We took out his entrails and
+sunk him in the creek; our friend furnished us with one fine horse, and
+we left him our foundered horses. We made our way through the Choctaw
+and Chickasaw Nations, and then to Williamson county, in this state. We
+should have made a fine trip if we had taken care of all we got.
+
+"I had become a considerable libertine, and when I returned home I spent
+a few months rioting in all the luxuries of forbidden pleasures with the
+girls of my acquaintance. My stock of cash was soon gone, and I put to
+my shift for more. I commenced with horses, and ran several from the
+adjoining counties. I had got associated with a young man who had
+professed to be a preacher among the Methodists, and a sharper he was;
+he was as slick on the tongue as goose-grease. I took my first lessons
+in divinity from this young preacher. He was highly respected by all
+who knew him, and well calculated to please; he first put me in the
+notion of preaching, to aid me in my speculations.
+
+"I got into difficulty about a mare that I had taken, and was imprisoned
+for near three years. I shifted it from court to court, but was at last
+found guilty, and whipped. During my confinement I read the scriptures,
+and became a good judge of theology. I had not neglected the criminal
+laws for many years before that time. When they turned me loose I was
+prepared for anything; I wanted to kill all but those of my own grit;
+and I will die by the side of one of them before I will desert.
+
+"My next speculation was in the Choctaw region; myself and brother stole
+two fine horses, and made our way into this country. We got in with an
+old negro man and his wife, and three sons, to go off with us to Texas,
+and promised them that, if they would work for us one year after we got
+there, we would let them go free, and told them many fine stories. The
+old negro became suspicious that we were going to sell him, and grew
+quite contrary; so we landed one day by the side of an island, and I
+requested him to go with me round the point of the island to hunt a
+good place to catch some fish. After we were hidden from our company I
+shot him through the head, and then ripped open his belly and tumbled
+him into the river. I returned to my company, and told them that the
+negro had fallen into the river, and that he never came up after he went
+under. We landed fifty miles above New Orleans, and went into the
+country and sold our negroes to a Frenchman for nineteen hundred
+dollars.
+
+"We went from where we sold the negroes to New Orleans, and dressed
+ourselves like young lords. I mixed with the loose characters at the
+_swamp_ every night. One night, as I was returning to the tavern where I
+boarded, I was stopped by two armed men, who demanded my money. I handed
+them my pocketbook, and observed that I was very happy to meet with
+them, as we were all of the same profession. One of them observed, 'D--d
+if I ever rob a brother chip. We have had our eyes on you and the man
+that has generally come with you for several nights; we saw so much
+rigging and glittering jewelry, that we concluded you must be some
+wealthy dandy, with a surplus of cash; and had determined to rid you of
+the trouble of some of it; but, if you are a robber, here is your
+pocketbook, and you must go with us to-night, and we will give you an
+introduction to several fine fellows of the block; but stop, do you
+understand this motion?' I answered it, and thanked them for their
+kindness, and turned with them. We went to old Mother Surgick's, and had
+a real frolic with her girls. That night was the commencement of my
+greatness in what the world calls villainy. The two fellows who robbed
+me were named Haines and Phelps; they made me known to all the
+speculators that visited New Orleans, and gave me the name of every
+fellow who would speculate that lived on the Mississippi river, and many
+of its tributary streams, from New Orleans up to all the large Western
+cities.
+
+"I had become acquainted with a Kentuckian, who boarded at the same
+tavern I did, and I suspected he had a large sum of money; I felt an
+inclination to count it for him before I left the city; so I made my
+notions known to Phelps and my other new comrades, and concerted our
+plan. I was to get him off to the _swamp_ with me on a spree, and when
+we were returning to our lodgings, my friends were to meet us and rob us
+both. I had got very intimate with the Kentuckian, and he thought me one
+of the best fellows in the world. He was very fond of wine; and I had
+him well fumed with good wine before I made the proposition for a
+frolic. When I invited him to walk with me he readily accepted the
+invitation. We cut a few shines with the girls, and started to the
+tavern. We were met by a band of robbers, and robbed of all our money.
+The Kentuckian was so mad that he cursed the whole city, and wished that
+it would all be deluged in a flood of water so soon as he left the
+place. I went to my friends the next morning, and got my share of the
+spoil money, and my pocketbook that I had been robbed of. We got seven
+hundred and fifty dollars of the bold Kentuckian, which was divided
+among thirteen of us.
+
+"I commenced traveling and making all the acquaintances among the
+speculators that I could. I went from New Orleans to Cincinnati, and
+from there I visited Lexington, in Kentucky. I found a speculator about
+four miles from Newport, who furnished me with a fine horse the second
+night after I arrived at his house. I went from Lexington to Richmond,
+in Virginia, and from there I visited Charleston, in the State of South
+Carolina; and from thence to Milledgeville, by the way of Savannah and
+Augusta, in the State of Georgia. I made my way from Milledgeville to
+Williamson county, the old stamping-ground. In all the route I only
+robbed eleven men but I preached some fine sermons, and scattered some
+counterfeit United States paper among my brethren.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"After I returned home from the first grand circuit I made among my
+speculators, I remained there but a short time, as I could not rest when
+my mind was not actively engaged in some speculation. I commenced the
+foundation of this mystic clan on that tour, and suggested the plan of
+exciting a rebellion among the negroes, as the sure road to an
+inexhaustible fortune to all who would engage in the expedition. The
+first mystic sign which is used by this clan was in use among robbers
+before I was born; and the second had its origin from myself, Phelps,
+Haines, Cooper, Doris, Bolton, Harris, Doddridge, Celly, Morris, Walton,
+Depont, and one of my brothers, on the second night after my
+acquaintance with them in New Orleans. We needed a higher order to carry
+on our designs, and we adopted our sign, and called it the sign of the
+Grand Council of the Mystic Clan; and practised ourselves to give and
+receive the new sign to a fraction before we parted; and, in addition to
+this improvement, we invented and formed a mode of corresponding, by
+means of ten characters, mixed with other matter, which has been very
+convenient on many occasions, and especially when any of us get into
+difficulties. I was encouraged in my new undertaking, and my heart began
+to beat high with the hope of being able one day to visit the pomp of
+the Southern and Western people in my vengeance; and of seeing their
+cities and towns one common scene of devastation, smoked walls and
+fragments.
+
+"I decoyed a negro man from his master in Middle Tennessee, and sent him
+to Mill's Point by a young man, and I waited to see the movements of the
+owner. He thought his negro had run off. So I started to take possession
+of my prize. I got another friend at Mill's Point to take my negro in a
+skiff, and convey him to the mouth of Red river, while I took passage on
+a steamboat. I then went through the country by land, and sold my negro
+for nine hundred dollars, and the second night after I sold him I stole
+him again, and my friend ran him to the Irish bayou in Texas; I
+followed on after him, and sold my negro in Texas for five hundred
+dollars. I then resolved to visit South America, and see if there was an
+opening in that country for a speculation; I had also concluded that I
+could get some strong friends in that quarter to aid me in my designs
+relative to a negro rebellion; but of all people in the world, the
+Spaniards are the most treacherous and cowardly; I never want them
+concerned in any matter with me; I had rather take the negroes in this
+country to fight than a Spaniard. I stopped in a village, and passed as
+a doctor, and commenced practising medicine. I could ape the doctor
+first-rate, having read Ewel, and several other works on primitive
+medicine. I became a great favorite of an old Catholic; he adopted me as
+his son in the faith, and introduced me to all the best families as a
+young doctor from North America. I had been with the old Catholic but a
+very short time before I was a great Roman Catholic, and bowed to the
+cross, and attended regularly to all the ceremonies of that persuasion;
+and, to tell you the fact, Hues, all the Catholic religion needs to be
+universally received, is to be correctly represented; but you know I
+care nothing for religion. I had been with the old Catholic about three
+months, and was getting a heavy practice, when an opportunity offered
+for me to rob the good man's secretary of nine hundred and sixty dollars
+in gold, and I could have got as much more in silver if I could have
+carried it. I was soon on the road for home again; I stopped three weeks
+in New Orleans as I came home, and had some high fun with old Mother
+Surgick's girls.
+
+"I collected all my associates in New Orleans at one of my friend's
+houses in that place, and we sat in council three days before we got all
+our plans to our notion; we then determined to undertake the rebellion
+at every hazard, and make as many friends as we could for that purpose.
+Every man's business being assigned him, I started for Natchez on foot.
+Having sold my horse in New Orleans with the intention of stealing
+another after I started, I walked four days, and no opportunity offered
+for me to get a horse. The fifth day, about twelve o'clock, I had become
+very tired, and stopped at a creek to get some water and rest a little.
+While I was sitting on a log, looking down the road I had come, a man
+came in sight riding a good-looking horse. The very moment I saw him I
+determined to have his horse if he was in the garb of a traveler. He
+rode up, and I saw from his equipage that he was a traveler. I arose
+from my seat and drew an elegant rifle pistol on him, and ordered him to
+dismount. He did so, and I took his horse by the bridle, and pointed
+down the creek, and ordered him to walk before me. We went a few hundred
+yards and stopped. I hitched his horse, then made him undress himself,
+all to his shirt and drawers, and ordered him to turn his back to me. He
+asked me if I was going to shoot him. I ordered him the second time to
+turn his back to me. He said, 'If you are determined to kill me, let me
+have time to pray before I die.' I told him I had no time to hear him
+pray. He turned round and dropped on his knees, and I shot him through
+the back of the head. I ripped open his belly, and took out his
+entrails, and sunk him in the creek. I then searched his pockets, and
+found four hundred and one dollars and thirty-seven cents, and a number
+of papers that I did not take time to examine. I sunk the pocketbook and
+papers and his hat in the creek. His boots were brand new, and fitted me
+very genteelly, and I put them on, and sunk my old shoes in the creek to
+atone for them. I rolled up his clothes and put them into his
+portmanteau, as they were quite new cloth of the best quality. I mounted
+as fine a horse as ever I straddled, and directed my course to Natchez
+in much better style than I had been for the last five days.
+
+"I reached Natchez, and spent two days with my friends at that place and
+the girls under the Hill together. I then left Natchez for the Choctaw
+nation, with the intention of giving some of them a chance for their
+property. As I was riding along between Benton and Rankin, planning for
+my designs, I was overtaken by a tall and good-looking young man, riding
+an elegant horse, which was splendidly rigged off; and the young
+gentleman's apparel was of the gayest that could be had, and his
+watch-chain and other jewelry were of the richest and best. I was
+anxious to know if he intended to travel through the Choctaw nation, and
+soon managed to learn. He said he had been to the lower country with a
+drove of negroes, and was returning home to Kentucky. We rode on, and
+soon got very intimate for strangers, and agreed to be company through
+the Indian nation. We were two fine-looking men, and, to hear us talk,
+we were very rich. I felt him on the subject of speculation, but he
+cursed the speculators, and said he was in a bad condition to fall into
+the hands of such villains, as he had the cash with him that twenty
+negroes had sold for; and that he was very happy that he happened to get
+in company with me through the nation. I concluded he was a noble prize,
+and longed to be counting his cash. At length we came into one of those
+long stretches in the Nation, where there was no house for twenty miles,
+on the third day after we had been in company with each other. The
+country was high, hilly, and broken, and no water; just about the time I
+reached the place where I intended to count my companion's cash, I
+became very thirsty, and insisted on turning down a deep hollow, or
+dale, that headed near the road, to hunt some water. We had followed
+down the dale for near four hundred yards, when I drew my pistol and
+shot him through. He fell dead; I commenced hunting for his cash, and
+opened his large pocketbook, which was stuffed very full; and when I
+began to open it I thought it was a treasure indeed; but oh! the
+contents of that book! it was richly filled with the copies of
+love-songs, the forms of love-letters, and some of his own
+composition,--but no cash. I began to cut off his clothes with my knife,
+and examine them for his money. I found four dollars and a half in
+change in his pockets, and no more. And is this the amount for which
+twenty negroes sold? thought I. I recollected his watch and jewelry, and
+I gathered them in; his chain was rich and good, but it was swung to an
+old brass watch. He was a puff for true, and I thought all such fools
+ought to die as soon as possible. I took his horse, and swapped him to
+an Indian native for four ponies, and sold them on the way home. I
+reached home, and spent a few weeks among the girls of my acquaintance,
+in all the enjoyments that money could afford.
+
+"My next trip was through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina,
+Virginia, and Maryland, and then back to South Carolina, and from there
+round by Florida and Alabama. I began to conduct the progress of my
+operations, and establish my emissaries over the country in every
+direction.
+
+"I have been going ever since from one place to another, directing and
+managing; but I have others now as good as myself to manage. This
+fellow, Phelps, that I was telling you of before, he is a noble chap
+among the negroes, and he wants them all free; he knows how to excite
+them as well as any person; but he will not do for a robber, as he
+cannot kill a man unless he has received an injury from him first. He is
+now in jail at Vicksburg, and I fear will hang. I went to see him not
+long since, but he is so strictly watched that nothing can be done. He
+has been in the habit of stopping men on the highway, and robbing them,
+and letting them go on; but that will never do for a robber; after I rob
+a man he will never give evidence against me, and there is but one safe
+plan in the business, and that is to kill--if I could not afford to kill
+a man, I would not rob.
+
+"The great object that we have in contemplation is to excite a rebellion
+among the negroes throughout the slave-holding states. Our plan is to
+manage so as to have it commence everywhere at the same hour. We have
+set on the 25th of December, 1835, for the time to commence our
+operations. We design having our companies so stationed over the
+country, in the vicinity of the banks and large cities, that when the
+negroes commence their carnage and slaughter, we will have detachments
+to fire the towns and rob the banks while all is confusion and dismay.
+The rebellion taking place everywhere at the same time, every part of
+the country will be engaged in its own defence; and one part of the
+country can afford no relief to another, until many places will be
+entirely overrun by the negroes, and our pockets replenished from the
+banks and the desks of rich merchants' houses. It is true that in many
+places in the slave states the negro population is not strong, and would
+be easily overpowered; but, back them with a few resolute leaders from
+our clan, they will murder thousands, and huddle the remainder into
+large bodies of stationary defence for their own preservation; and then,
+in many other places, the black population is much the strongest, and
+under a leader would overrun the country before any steps could be taken
+to suppress them.
+
+"We do not go to every negro we see and tell him that the negroes intend
+to rebel on the night of the 25th of December, 1835. We find the most
+vicious and wickedly disposed on large farms, and poison their minds by
+telling them how they are mistreated. When we are convinced that we have
+found a bloodthirsty devil, we swear him to secrecy and disclose to him
+the secret, and convince him that every other state and section of
+country where there are any negroes intend to rebel and slay all the
+whites they can on the night of the 25th of December, 1835, and assure
+him that there are thousands of white men engaged in trying to free
+them, who will die by their sides in battle. We have a long ceremony for
+the oath, which is administered in the presence of a terrific picture
+painted for that purpose, representing the monster who is to deal with
+him should he prove unfaithful in the engagements he has entered into.
+This picture is highly calculated to make a negro true to his trust, for
+he is disposed to be superstitious at best.
+
+"Our black emissaries have the promise of a share in the spoils we may
+gain, and we promise to conduct them to Texas should we be defeated,
+where they will be free; but we never talk of being defeated. We always
+talk of victory and wealth to them. There is no danger in any man, if
+you can ever get him once implicated or engaged in a matter. That is the
+way we employ our strikers in all things; we have them implicated before
+we trust them from our sight.
+
+"This may seem too bold, but that is what I glory in. All the crimes I
+have ever committed have been of the most daring; and I have been
+successful in all my attempts as yet; and I am confident that I will be
+victorious in this matter, as in the robberies which I have in
+contemplation; and I will have the pleasure and honor of seeing and
+knowing that by my management I have glutted the earth with more human
+gore, and destroyed more property, than any other robber who has ever
+lived in America, or the known world. I look on the American people as
+my common enemy. My clan is strong, brave, and experienced, and rapidly
+increasing in strength every day. I should not be surprised if we were
+to be two thousand strong by the 25th of December, 1835; and, in
+addition to this, I have the advantage of any other leader of banditti
+that has ever preceded me, for at least one-half of my Grand Council are
+men of high standing, and many of them in honorable and lucrative
+offices."
+
+The number of men, more or less prominent, in the different states
+included: sixty-one from Tennessee, forty-seven from Mississippi,
+forty-six from Arkansas, twenty-five from Kentucky, twenty-seven from
+Missouri, twenty-eight from Alabama, thirty-three from Georgia,
+thirty-five from South Carolina, thirty-two from North Carolina,
+twenty-one from Virginia, twenty-seven from Maryland, sixteen from
+Florida, thirty-two from Louisiana. The transient members who made a
+habit of traveling from place to place numbered twenty-two; Murrell said
+that there was a total list of two thousand men in his band, including
+all classes.
+
+To the foregoing sketch of Murrell's life Mr. Alexander Hynds, historian
+of Tennessee, adds some facts and comments which will enable the reader
+more fully to make his own estimate as to this singular man:
+
+     "The central meeting place of Murrell's band was near an enormous
+     cottonwood tree in Mississippi county, Arkansas. It was standing in
+     1890, and is perhaps still standing in the wilderness shortly above
+     Memphis. His widely scattered bands had a system of signs and
+     passwords. Murrell himself was married to the sister of one of his
+     gang. He bought a good farm near Denmark, Madison county,
+     Tennessee, where he lived as a plain farmer, while he conducted the
+     most fearful schemes of rapine and murder from New Orleans up to
+     Memphis, St. Louis and Cincinnati.
+
+     "Nature had done much for Murrell. He had a quick mind, a fine
+     natural address and great adaptability; and he was as much at ease
+     among the refined and cultured as with his own gang. He made a
+     special study of criminal law, and knew something of medicine. He
+     often palmed himself off as a preacher, and preached in large
+     camp-meetings--and some were converted under his ministry! He often
+     used his clerical garb in passing counterfeit money. With a clear
+     head, cool, fine judgment, and a nature utterly without fear, moral
+     or physical, his power over his men never waned. To them he was
+     just, fair and amiable. He was a kind husband and brother, and a
+     faithful friend. He took great pride in his position and in the
+     operations of his gang. This conceit was the only weak spot in his
+     nature, and led to his downfall.
+
+     "Stewart, who purports to be Murrell's biographer, made Murrell's
+     acquaintance, pretended to join his gang, and playing on his
+     vanity, attended a meeting of the gang at the rendezvous at the Big
+     Cottonwood, and saw the meeting of the Grand Council. He had
+     Murrell arrested, and he was tried, convicted and sent to the
+     Tennessee penitentiary in 1834 for ten years. There he worked in
+     the blacksmith shops, but by the time he got out, was broken down
+     in mind and body, emerging an imbecile and an invalid, to live less
+     than a year.
+
+     "Stewart's account holds inconsistencies and inaccuracies, such as
+     that many men high in social and official life belonged to
+     Murrell's gang, which his published lists do not show. He had
+     perhaps 440 to 450 men, scattered from New Orleans to Cincinnati,
+     but his downfall spread fear and distrust among them.
+
+     "At Vicksburg, on July 4, 1835, a drunken member of the gang
+     threatened to attack the authorities, and was tarred and feathered.
+     Others of the gang, or at least several well-known gamblers,
+     collected and defied the citizens, and killed the good and brave
+     Dr. Bodley. Five men were hung, Hullams, Dutch Bill, North, Smith
+     and McCall. The news swept like wildfire through the Mississippi
+     Valley and gave heart to the lovers of law and order. At one or two
+     other places some were shot, some were hanged, and now and then one
+     or two were sent to prison, and thus an end was put to organized
+     crime in the Southwest forever; and this closed out the reign of
+     the river cutthroats, pirates and gamblers as well."
+
+Thus, as in the case of Sturdevant, lynch law put an effectual end to
+outlawry that the law itself could not control.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V
+
+The Vigilantes of California--_The Greatest Vigilante Movement of the
+World_--_History of the California "Stranglers" and Their Methods_.
+
+
+The world will never see another California. Great gold stampedes there
+may be, but under conditions far different from those of 1849.
+Transportation has been so developed, travel has become so swift and
+easy, that no section can now long remain segregated from the rest of
+the world. There is no corner of the earth which may not now be reached
+with a celerity impossible in the days of the great rush to the Pacific
+Coast. The whole structure of civilization, itself based upon
+transportation, goes swiftly forward with that transportation, and the
+tent of the miner or adventurer finds immediately erected by its side
+the temple of the law.
+
+It was not thus in those early days of our Western history. The law was
+left far behind by reason of the exigencies of geography and of
+wilderness travel. Thousands of honest men pressed on across the plains
+and mountains inflamed, it is true, by the madness of the lust for gold,
+but carrying at the outset no wish to escape from the watch-care of the
+law. With them went equal numbers of those eager to escape all
+restraints of society and law, men intending never to aid in the
+uprearing of the social system in new wild lands. Both these elements,
+the law-loving and the law-hating, as they advanced _pari-passu_ farther
+and farther from the staid world which they had known, noticed the
+development of a strange phenomenon: that law, which they had left
+behind them, waned in importance with each passing day. The standards of
+the old home changed, even as customs changed. A week's journey from the
+settlements showed the argonaut a new world. A month hedged it about to
+itself, alone, apart, with ideas and values of its own and independent
+of all others. A year sufficed to leave that world as distinct as though
+it occupied a planet all its own. For that world the divine fire of the
+law must be re-discovered, evolved, nay, evoked fresh from chaos even as
+the savage calls forth fire from the dry and sapless twigs of the
+wilderness.
+
+In the gold country all ideas and principles were based upon new
+conditions. Precedents did not exist. Man had gone savage again, and it
+was the beginning. Yet this savage, willing to live as a savage in a
+land which was one vast encampment, was the Anglo-Saxon savage, and
+therefore carried with him that chief trait of the American character,
+the principle that what a man earns--not what he steals, but what he
+earns--is his and his alone. This principle sowed in ground forbidding
+and unpromising was the seed of the law out of which has sprung the
+growth of a mighty civilization fit to be called an empire of its own.
+The growth and development of law under such conditions offered
+phenomena not recorded in the history of any other land or time.
+
+In the first place, and even while in transit, men organized for the
+purpose of self-protection, and in this necessary act law-abiding and
+criminal elements united. After arriving at the scenes of the gold
+fields, such organization was forgotten; even the parties that had
+banded together in the Eastern states as partners rarely kept together
+for a month after reaching the region where luck, hazard and
+opportunity, inextricably blended, appealed to each man to act for
+himself and with small reference to others. The first organizations of
+the mining camps were those of the criminal element. They were presently
+met by the organization of the law and order men. Hard upon the miners'
+law came the regularly organized legal machinery of the older states,
+modified by local conditions, and irretrievably blended with a politics
+more corrupt than any known before or since. Men were busy in picking up
+raw gold from the earth, and they paid small attention to courts and
+government. The law became an unbridled instrument of evil. Judges of
+the courts openly confiscated the property of their enemies, or
+sentenced them with no reference to the principles of justice, with as
+great disregard for life and liberty as was ever known in the
+Revolutionary days of France. Against this manner of government
+presently arose the organizations of the law-abiding, the
+justice-loving, and these took the law into their own stern hands. The
+executive officers of the law, the sheriffs and constables, were in
+league to kill and confiscate; and against these the new agency of the
+actual law made war, constituting themselves into an arm of essential
+government, and openly called themselves Vigilantes. In turn criminals
+used the cloak of the Vigilantes to cover their own deeds of lawlessness
+and violence. The Vigilantes purged themselves of the false members, and
+carried their own title of opprobrium, the "stranglers," with unconcern
+or pride. They grew in numbers, the love of justice their lodestone,
+until at one time they numbered more than five thousand in the city of
+San Francisco alone, and held that community in a grip of lawlessness,
+or law, as you shall choose to term it. They set at defiance the chief
+executive of the state, erected an armed castle of their own, seized
+upon the arms of the militia, defied the government of the United States
+and even the United States army! They were, as you shall choose to call
+them, criminals, or great and noble men. Seek as you may to-day, you
+will never know the full roster of their names, although they made no
+concealment of their identity; and no one, to this day, has ever been
+able to determine who took the first step in their organization. They
+began their labors in California at a time when there had been more than
+two thousand murders--five hundred in one year--and not five legal
+executions. Their task included the erection of a fit structure of the
+law, and, incidentally, the destruction of a corrupt and unworthy
+structure claiming the title of the law. In this strange, swift panorama
+there is all the story of the social system, all the picture of the
+building of that temple of the law which, as Americans, we now revere,
+or, at times, still despise and desecrate.
+
+At first the average gold seeker concerned himself little with law,
+because he intended to make his fortune quickly and then hasten back
+East to his former home; yet, as early as the winter of 1849, there was
+elected a legislature which met at San Jose, a Senate of sixteen members
+and an Assembly of thirty-six. In this election the new American vote
+was in evidence. The miners had already tired of the semi-military phase
+of their government, and had met and adopted a state constitution. The
+legislature enacted one hundred and forty new laws in two months, and
+abolished all former laws; and then, satisfied with its labors, it left
+the enforcement of the laws, in the good old American fashion, to
+whomsoever might take an interest in the matter.[D] This is our custom
+even to-day. Our great cities of the East are practically all governed,
+so far as they are governed at all, by civic leagues, civic federations,
+citizens' leagues, business men's associations--all protests at
+non-enforcement of the law. This protest in '49 and on the Pacific coast
+took a sterner form.
+
+[Footnote D: Tuthill: "History of California."]
+
+At one time the city of San Francisco had three separate and distinct
+city councils, each claiming to be the only legal one. In spite of the
+new state organization, the law was much a matter of go as you please.
+Under such conditions it was no wonder that outlawry began to show its
+head in bold and well-organized forms. A party of ruffians, who called
+themselves the "Hounds," banded together to run all foreigners out of
+the rich camps, and to take their diggings over for themselves. A number
+of Chileans were beaten or shot, and their property was confiscated or
+destroyed. This was not in accordance with the saving grace of American
+justice, which devoted to a man that which he had earned. A counter
+organization was promptly formed, and the "Hounds" found themselves
+confronted with two hundred "special constables," each with a good
+rifle. A mass meeting sat as a court, and twenty of the "Hounds" were
+tried, ten of them receiving sentences that never were enforced, but
+which had the desired effect. So now, while far to the eastward the
+Congress was hotly arguing the question of the admission of California
+as a state, she was beginning to show an interest in law and justice
+when aroused thereto.
+
+It was difficult material out of which to build a civilized community.
+The hardest population of the entire world was there; men savage or
+civilized by tradition, heathen or Christian once at least, but now all
+Californian. Wealth was the one common thing. The average daily return
+in the work of mining ranged from twenty to thirty dollars, and no man
+might tell when his fortune might be made by a blow of a pick. Some
+nuggets of gold weighing twenty-five pounds were discovered. In certain
+diggings men picked pure gold from the rock crevices with a spoon or a
+knife point. As to values, they were guessed at, the only currency being
+gold dust or nuggets. Prodigality was universal. All the gamblers of the
+world met in vulture concourse. There was little in the way of home; of
+women almost none. Life was as cheap as gold dust. Let those who liked
+bother about statehood and government and politics; the average man was
+too busy digging and spending gold to trouble over such matters. The
+most shameless men were those found in public office. Wealth and
+commerce waxed great, but law and civilization languished. The times
+were ripening for the growth of some system of law which would offer
+proper protection to life and property. The measure of this need may be
+seen from the figures of the production of gold. From 1848 to 1856
+California produced between five hundred and six hundred million dollars
+in virgin gold. What wonder the courts were weak; and what wonder the
+Vigilantes became strong!
+
+There were in California three distinct Vigilante movements, those of
+1849, 1851, and 1856, the earliest applying rather to the outlying
+mining camps than to the city of San Francisco. In 1851, seeing that the
+courts made no attempt to punish criminals, a committee was formed which
+did much toward enforcing respect for the principles of justice, if not
+of law. On June 11 they hanged John Jenkins for robbing a store. A month
+later they hanged James Stuart for murdering a sheriff. In August of the
+same summer they took out of jail and hanged Whittaker and McKenzie,
+Australian ex-convicts, whom they had tried and sentenced, but who had
+been rescued by the officers of the law. Two weeks later this committee
+disbanded. They paid no attention to the many killings that were going
+on over land titles and the like, but confined themselves to punishing
+men who had committed intolerable crimes. Theft was as serious as
+murder, perhaps more so, in the creed of the time and place. The list of
+murders reached appalling dimensions. The times were sadly out of joint.
+The legislature was corrupt, graft was rampant--though then unknown by
+that name--and the entire social body was restless, discontented, and
+uneasy. Politics had become a fine art. The judiciary, lazy and corrupt,
+was held in contempt. The dockets of the courts were full, and little
+was done to clear them effectively. Criminals did as they liked and went
+unwhipped of justice. It was truly a day of violence and license.
+
+Once more the sober and law-loving men of California sent abroad word,
+and again the Vigilantes assembled. In 1853 they hanged two Mexicans for
+horse stealing, and also a bartender who had shot a citizen near Shasta.
+At Jackson they hanged another Mexican for horse stealing, and at
+Volcano, in 1854, they hanged a man named Macy for stabbing an old and
+helpless man. In this instance vengeance was very swift, for the
+murderer was executed within half an hour after his deed. The haste
+caused certain criticism when, in the same month one Johnson was hanged
+for stabbing a man named Montgomery, at Iowa Hill, who later recovered.
+At Los Angeles three men were sentenced to death by the local court, but
+the Supreme Court issued a stay for two of them, Brown and Lee. The
+people asserted that all must die together, and the mayor of the city
+was of the same mind. The third man, Alvitre, was hanged legally on
+January 12, 1855. On that day the mayor resigned his office to join the
+Vigilantes. Brown was taken out of jail and hanged in spite of the
+decision of the Supreme Court. The people were out-running the law. That
+same month they hanged another murderer for killing the treasurer of
+Tuolumne county. In the following month they hanged three more cattle
+thieves in Contra Costa county, and followed this by hanging a horse
+thief in Oakland. A larger affair threatened in the following summer,
+when thirty-six Mexicans were arrested for killing a party of Americans.
+For a time it was proposed to hang all thirty-six, but sober counsel
+prevailed and only three were hanged; this after formal jury trial.
+Unknown bandits waylaid and killed Isaac B. Wall and T. S. Williamson of
+Monterey, and, that same month U. S. Marshal William H. Richardson was
+shot by Charles Cora in the streets of San Francisco. The people
+grumbled. There was no certainty that justice would ever reach these
+offenders. The reputation of the state was ruined, not by the acts of
+the Vigilantes, but by those of unscrupulous and unprincipled men in
+office and upon the bench. The government was run by gamblers, ruffians,
+and thugs. The good men of the state began to prepare for a general
+movement of purification and the installation of an actual law. The
+great Vigilante movement of 1856 was the result.
+
+The immediate cause of this last organization was the murder of James
+King, editor of the _Bulletin_, by James P. Casey. Casey, after shooting
+King, was hurried off to jail by his own friends, and there was
+protected by a display of military force. King lingered for six days
+after he was shot, and the state of public opinion was ominous. Cora,
+who had killed Marshal Richardson, had never been punished, and there
+seemed no likelihood that Casey would be. The local press was divided.
+The religious papers, the _Pacific_ and the _Christian Advocate_, both
+openly declared that Casey ought to be hanged. The clergy took up the
+matter sternly, and one minister of the Gospel, Rev. J. A. Benton, of
+Sacramento, gave utterance to this remarkable but well-grounded
+statement: "_A people can be justified in recalling delegated power and
+resuming its exercise._" Before we hasten to criticize sweepingly under
+the term "mob law" such work as this of the Vigilantes, it will be well
+for us to weigh that utterance, and to apply it to conditions of our own
+times; to-day is well-nigh as dangerous to American liberties as were
+the wilder days of California.
+
+Now, summoned by some unknown command, armed men appeared in the streets
+of San Francisco, twenty-four companies in all, with perhaps fifty men
+in each company. The Vigilantes had organized again. They brought a
+cannon and placed it against the jail gate, and demanded that Casey be
+surrendered to them. There was no help for it, and Casey went away
+handcuffed, to face a court where political influence would mean
+nothing. An hour later the murderer Cora was taken from his cell, and
+was hastened away to join Casey in the headquarters building of the
+Vigilantes. A company of armed and silent men marched on each side of
+the carriage containing the prisoner. The two men were tried in formal
+session of the Committee, each having counsel, and all evidence being
+carefully weighed.
+
+King died on May 20, 1856, and on May 22d was buried with popular
+honors, a long procession of citizens following the body to the
+cemetery. A popular subscription was started, and in a brief time over
+thirty thousand dollars was raised for the benefit of his widow and
+children. When the long procession filed back into the city, it was to
+witness, swinging from a beam projecting from a window of Committee
+headquarters, the bodies of Casey and Cora.
+
+The Committee now arrested two more men, not for a capital crime, but
+for one which lay back of a long series of capital crimes--the stuffing
+of ballot-boxes and other election frauds. These men were Billy Mulligan
+and the prize-fighter known as Yankee Sullivan. Although advised that he
+would have a fair trial and that the death penalty would not be passed
+upon him, Yankee Sullivan committed suicide in his cell. The entire
+party of lawyers and judges were arrayed against the Committee,
+naturally enough. Judge Terry, of the Supreme Court, issued a writ of
+_habeas corpus_ for Mulligan. The Committee ignored the sheriff who was
+sent to serve the writ. They cleared the streets in front of
+headquarters, established six cannon in front of their rooms, put loaded
+swivels on top of the roof and mounted a guard of a hundred riflemen.
+They brought bedding and provisions to their quarters, mounted a huge
+triangle on the roof for a signal to their men all over the city,
+arranged the interior of their rooms in the form of a court and, in
+short, set themselves up as the law, openly defying their own Supreme
+Court of the state. So far from being afraid of the vengeance of the
+law, they arrested two more men for election frauds, Chas. P. Duane and
+"Woolly" Kearney. All their prisoners were guarded in cells within the
+headquarters building.
+
+The opposition to the Committee now organized in turn under the name of
+the "Law and Order Men," and held a public meeting. This was numerously
+attended by members of the Vigilante Committee, whose books were now
+open for enrollment. Not even the criticism of their own friends stayed
+these men in their resolution. They went even further. Governor Johnson
+issued a proclamation to them to disband and disperse. They paid no more
+attention to this than they had to Judge Terry's writ of _habeas
+corpus_. The governor threatened them with the militia, but it was not
+enough to frighten them. General Sherman resigned his command in the
+state militia, and counseled moderation at so dangerous a time. Many of
+the militia turned in their rifles to the Committee, which got other
+arms from vessels in the harbor, and from carelessly guarded armories.
+Halting at no responsibility, a band of the Committee even boarded a
+schooner which was carrying down a cargo of rifles from the governor to
+General Howard at San Francisco, and seized the entire lot. Shortly
+after this they confiscated a second shipment which the governor was
+sending down from Sacramento in the same way; thus seizing property of
+the federal government. If there was such a crime as high treason, they
+committed it, and did so openly and without hesitation. Governor
+Johnson contented himself with drawing up a statement of the situation,
+which was sent down to President Pierce at Washington, with the request
+that he instruct naval officers on the Pacific station to supply arms to
+the State of California, which had been despoiled by certain of its
+citizens. President Pierce turned over the matter to his
+attorney-general, Caleb Cushing, who rendered an opinion saying that
+Governor Johnson had not yet exhausted the state remedies, and that the
+United States government could not interfere.
+
+Little remained for the Committee to do to show its resolution to act as
+the State _pro tempore_. That little it now proceeded to do by
+practically suspending the Supreme Court of California. In making an
+arrest of a witness wanted by the Committee, Sterling A. Hopkins, one of
+the policemen retained for work by the Committee, was stabbed in the
+throat by Judge Terry, of the Supreme Bench, who was very bitter against
+all members of the Committee. It was supposed that the wound would prove
+fatal, and at once the Committee sounded the call for general assembly.
+The city went into two hostile camps, Terry and his friend, Dr. Ashe,
+taking refuge in the armory where the "Law and Order" faction kept
+their arms. The members of the Vigilante Committee besieged this place,
+and presently took charge of Terry and Ashe, as prisoners. Then the
+scouts of the Committee went out after the arms of all the armories
+belonging to the governor and the "Law and Order" men who supported him,
+the lawyers and politicians who felt that their functions were being
+usurped. Two thousand rifles were taken, and the opposing party was left
+without arms. The entire state, so to speak, was now in the hands of the
+"Committee of Vigilance," a body of men, quiet, law-loving,
+law-enforcing, but of course technically traitors and criminals. The
+parallel of this situation has never existed elsewhere in American
+history.
+
+Had Hopkins died the probability is that Judge Terry would have been
+hanged by the Committee, but fortunately he did not die. Terry lay a
+prisoner in the cell assigned him at the Committee's rooms for seven
+weeks, by which time Hopkins had recovered from the wound given him by
+Terry. The case became one of national interest, and tirades against
+"the Stranglers" were not lacking; but the Committee went on enrolling
+men. And it did not open its doors for its prisoners, although appeal
+was made to Congress in Terry's behalf--an appeal which was referred to
+the Committee on Judiciary, and so buried.
+
+Terry was finally released, much to the regret of many of the Committee,
+who thought he should have been punished. The executive committee called
+together the board of delegates, and issued a statement showing that
+death and banishment were the only penalties optional with them. Death
+they could not inflict, because Hopkins had recovered; and banishment
+they thought impractical at that time, as it might prolong discussion
+indefinitely, and enforce a longer term in service than the Committee
+cared for. It was the earnest wish of all to disband at the first moment
+that they considered their state and city fit to take care of
+themselves, and the sacredness of the ballot-box again insured. To
+assure this latter fact, they had arrayed themselves against the federal
+government, as certainly they had against the state government.
+
+The Committee now hanged two more murderers--Hetherington and Brace--the
+former a gambler from St. Louis, the latter a youth of New York
+parentage, twenty-one years of age, but hardened enough to curse
+volubly upon the scaffold. By the middle of August, 1856, they had no
+more prisoners in charge, and were ready to turn the city over to its
+own system of government. Their report, published in the following fall,
+showed they had hanged four men and banished many others, besides
+frightening out of the country a large criminal population that did not
+tarry for arrest and trial.
+
+If opinion was divided to some extent in San Francisco, where those
+stirring deeds occurred, the sentiment of the outlying communities of
+California was almost a unit in favor of the Vigilantes, and their
+action received the sincere flattery of imitation, as half a score of
+criminals learned to their sorrow on impromptu scaffolds. There was no
+large general organization in any other community, however. After a time
+some of the banished men came back, and many damage suits were argued
+later in the courts; but small satisfaction came to those claimants, and
+few men who knew of the deeds of the "Committee of Vigilance" ever cared
+to discuss them. Indeed it was practically certain that any man who ever
+served on a Western vigilance committee finished his life with sealed
+lips. Had he ventured to talk of what he knew he would have met
+contempt or something harsher.
+
+A political capital was made out of the situation in San Francisco. The
+"Committee of Vigilance" felt that it had now concluded its work and was
+ready to go back to civil life. On August 18, 1856, the Committee
+marched openly in review through the streets of the city, five thousand
+one hundred and thirty-seven men in line, with three companies of
+artillery, eighteen cannon, a company of dragoons, and a medical staff
+of forty odd physicians. There were in this body one hundred and fifty
+men who had served in the old Committee in 1851. After the parade the
+men halted, the assemblage broke up into companies, the companies into
+groups; and thus, quietly, with no vaunting of themselves and no
+concealment of their acts, there passed away one of the most singular
+and significant organizations of American citizens ever known. They did
+this with the quiet assertion that if their services were again needed,
+they would again assemble; and they printed a statement covering their
+actions in detail, showing to any fair-minded man that what they had
+done was indeed for the good of the whole community, which had been
+wronged by those whom it had elected to power, those who had set
+themselves up as masters where they had been chosen as servants.
+
+The "Committee of Vigilance" of San Francisco was made up of men from
+all walks of life and all political parties. It had any amount of money
+at its command that it required, for its members were of the best and
+most influential citizens. It maintained, during its existence, quarters
+unique in their way, serving as arms-room, trial court, fortress, and
+prison. It was not a mob, but a grave and orderly band of men, and its
+deliberations were formal and exact, its labors being divided among
+proper sub-committees and boards. The quarters were kept open day and
+night, always ready for swift action, if necessary. It had an executive
+committee, which upon occasion conferred with a board of delegates
+composed of three men from each subdivision of the general body. The
+executive committee consisted of thirty-three members, and its decision
+was final; but it could not enforce a death penalty except on a
+two-thirds vote of those present. It had a prosecuting attorney, and it
+tried no prisoner without assigning to him competent counsel. It had
+also a police force, with a chief of police and a sheriff with several
+deputies. In short, it took over the government, and was indeed the
+government, municipal and state in one. Recent as was its life, its
+deeds to-day are well-nigh forgotten. Though opinion may be still
+divided in certain quarters, California need not be ashamed of this
+"Committee of Vigilance." She should be proud of it, for it was largely
+through its unthanked and dangerous safeguarding of the public interests
+that California gained her social system of to-day.
+
+In all the history of American desperadoism and of the movements which
+have checked it, there is no page more worth study than this from the
+story of the great Golden State. The moral is a sane, clean, and strong
+one. The creed of the "Committee of Vigilance" is one which we might
+well learn to-day; and its practice would leave us with more dignity of
+character than we can claim, so long as we content ourselves merely with
+outcry and criticism, with sweeping accusation of our unfaithful public
+servants, and without seeing that they are punished. There is nothing
+but manhood and freedom and justice in the covenant of the Committee.
+That covenant all American citizens should be ready to sign and live up
+to: "We do bind ourselves each unto the other by a solemn oath to do and
+perform every just and lawful act for the maintenance of law and order,
+_and to sustain the laws when faithfully and properly administered_. But
+we are determined that no thief, burglar, incendiary, assassin,
+_ballot-box stuffer or other disturber of the peace_, shall escape
+punishment, either by quibbles of the law, the carelessness of the
+police or a laxity of those who pretend to administer justice."
+
+What a man earns, that is his--such was the lesson of California.
+Self-government is our right as a people--that is what the Vigilantes
+said. When the laws failed of execution, then it was the people's right
+to resume the power that they had delegated, or which had been usurped
+from them--that is their statement as quoted by one of the ablest of
+many historians of this movement. The people might withdraw authority
+when faithless servants used it to thwart justice--that was what the
+Vigilantes preached. It is good doctrine to-day.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VI
+
+The Outlaw of the Mountains--_The Gold Stampedes of the '60's_--_Armed
+Bandits of the Mountain Mining Camps_.
+
+
+The greatest of American gold stampedes, and perhaps the greatest of the
+world, not even excepting that of Australia, was that following upon the
+discovery of gold in California. For twenty years all the West was mad
+for gold. No other way would serve but the digging of wealth directly
+from the soil. Agriculture was too slow, commerce too tame, to satisfy
+the bold population of the frontier. The history of the first struggle
+for mining claims in California--one stampede after another, as this,
+that and the other "strike" was reported in new localities--was repeated
+all over the vast region of the auriferous mountain lands lying between
+the plains and California, which were swiftly prospected by men who had
+now learned well the prospector's trade. The gold-hunters lapped back on
+their own trails, and, no longer content with California, began to
+prospect lower Oregon, upper Idaho, and Western Montana. Walla Walla was
+a supply point for a time. Florence was a great mountain market, and
+Lewiston. One district after another sprang into prominence, to fade
+away after a year or two of feverish life. The placers near Bannack
+caught a wild set of men, who surged back from California. Oro Fino was
+a temporary capital; then the fabulously rich placer which made Alder
+Gulch one of the quickly perished but still unforgotten diggings.
+
+The flat valley of this latter gulch housed several "towns," but was
+really for a dozen miles a continuous string of miners' cabins. The city
+of Helena is built on the tailings of these placer washings, and its
+streets are literally paved with gold even to-day. Here in 1863, while
+the great conflict between North and South was raging, a great community
+of wild men, not organized into anything fit to be called society,
+divided and fought bitterly for control of the apparently exhaustless
+wealth which came pouring from the virgin mines. These clashing
+factions repeated, in intensified form, the history of California. They
+were even more utterly cut off from all the world. Letters and papers
+from the states had to reach the mountains by way of California, via the
+Horn or the Isthmus. Touch with the older civilization was utterly lost;
+of law there was none.
+
+Upon the social horizon now appeared the sinister figure of the trained
+desperado, the professional bad man. The business of outlawry was turned
+into a profession, one highly organized, relatively safe and extremely
+lucrative. There was wealth to be had for the asking or the taking. Each
+miner had his buckskin purse filled with native gold. This dust was like
+all other dust. It could not be traced nor identified; and the old
+saying, "'Twas mine, 'tis his," might here of all places in the world
+most easily become true. Checks, drafts, currency as we know it now, all
+the means by which civilized men keep record of their property
+transactions, were unknown. The gold-scales established the only
+currency, and each man was his own banker, obliged to be his own peace
+officer, and the defender of his own property.
+
+Now our desperado appeared, the man who had killed his man, or, more
+likely, several men, and who had not been held sternly to an accounting
+for his acts; the man with the six-shooter and the skill to use it more
+swiftly and accurately than the average man; the man with the mind which
+did not scruple at murder. He found much to encourage him, little to
+oppose him. "The crowd from both East and West had now arrived. The town
+was full of gold-hunters. Expectation lighted up the countenance of
+every new-comer. Few had yet realized the utter despair of failure in a
+mining camp. In the presence of vice in all its forms, men who were
+staid and exemplary at home laid aside their morality like a useless
+garment, and yielded to the seductive influences spread for their ruin.
+The gambling-shops and hurdy-gurdy saloons--beheld for the first time by
+many of these fortune-seekers--lured them on step by step, until many of
+them abandoned all thought of the object they had in pursuit for lives
+of shameful and criminal indulgence. The condition of society thus
+produced was fatal to all attempts at organization, either for
+protection or good order."
+
+Yet the same condition made opportunity for those who did not wish to
+see a society established. Wherever the law-abiding did not organize,
+the bandits did; and the strength of their party, the breadth and
+boldness of its operations, and the length of time it carried on its
+unmolested operations, form one of the most extraordinary incidents in
+American history. They killed, robbed, and terrorized over hundreds of
+miles of mountain country, for years setting at defiance all attempts at
+their restraint. They recognized no command except that of their
+"chief," whose title was always open to contest, and who gained his own
+position only by being more skilful, more bloodthirsty, and more
+unscrupulous than his fellows.
+
+Henry Plummer, the most important captain of these cutthroats of the
+mountains, had a hundred or more men in his widely scattered criminal
+confederacy. More than one hundred murders were committed by these
+banditti in the space of three years. Many others were, without doubt,
+committed and never traced. Dead bodies were common in those hills, and
+often were unidentified. The wanderer from the States usually kept his
+own counsel. None knew who his family might be; and that family,
+missing a member who disappeared into the maw of the great West of that
+day of danger, might never know the fate of the one mysteriously
+vanished.
+
+These robbers had their confederates scattered in all ranks of life.
+Plummer himself was sheriff of his county, and had confederates in
+deputies or city marshals. This was a strange feature of this old
+desperadoism in the West--it paraded often in the guise of the law. We
+shall find further instances of this same phenomenon. Employes, friends,
+officials--there was none that one might trust. The organization of the
+robbers even extended to the stage lines, and a regular system of
+communication existed by which the allies advised each other when and
+where such and such a passenger was going, with such and such an amount
+of gold upon him. The holding up of the stage was something regularly
+expected, and the traveler who had any money or valuables drew a long
+breath when he reached a region where there was really a protecting law.
+Men were shot down in the streets on little or no provocation, and the
+murderer boasted of his crime and defied punishment. The dance-halls
+were run day and night. The drinking of whiskey, and, moreover, bad
+whiskey, was a thing universal. Vice was everywhere and virtue was not.
+Those few who had an aim and an ambition in life were long in the
+minority and, in the welter of a general license, they might not
+recognize each other and join hands. Murder and pillage ruled, until at
+length the spirit of law and order, born anew of necessity, grew and
+gained power as it did in most early communities of the West. How these
+things in time took place may best be seen by reference to the bloody
+biographies of some of the most reckless desperadoes ever seen in any
+land.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VII
+
+Henry Plummer--_A Northern Bad Man_--_The Head of the Robber Band in the
+Montana Mining Country_--_A Man of Brains and Ability, but a
+Cold-Blooded Murderer_.
+
+
+Henry Plummer was for several years in the early '60's the "chief" of
+the widely extended band of robbers and murderers who kept the
+placer-mining fields of Montana and Idaho in a state of terror. Posing
+part of the time as an officer of the law, he was all the time the
+leader in the reign of lawlessness. He was always ready for combat, and
+he so relied upon his own skill that he would even give his antagonist
+the advantage--or just enough advantage to leave himself sure to kill
+him. His victims in duels of this sort were many, and, as to his victims
+in cold-blooded robbery, in which death wiped out the record, no one
+will ever know the list.
+
+Plummer was born in Connecticut in 1837, and, until his departure as a
+young man for the West, he was all that might be expected of one brought
+up under the chastening influences of a New England home. He received a
+good education, and became a polished, affable, and gentlemanly
+appearing man. He was about five feet ten, possibly five feet eleven
+inches in height, and weighed about one hundred and sixty pounds, being
+rather slender in appearance. His face was handsome and his demeanor
+always frank and open, although he was quiet and did not often talk
+unless accosted. His voice was low and pleasant, and he had no bravado
+or swagger about him. His eye was light in color and singularly devoid
+of expression. Two features gave him a sinister look--his forehead,
+which was low and brutish, and his eye, which was cold and fish-like.
+His was a strong, well-keyed nervous organization. He was quick as a cat
+when in action, though apparently suave and easy in disposition. He was
+a good pistol shot, perhaps the best of all the desperadoes who infested
+Idaho and Montana at that time. Not even in his cups did he lose control
+of voice and eye and weapon. He was always ready--a cool, quiet,
+self-possessed, well-regulated killing machine.
+
+At the date of Plummer's arrival in the mining country, the town of
+Lewiston, Idaho, was the emporium of a wide region then embraced under
+the name of Idaho Territory; the latter also including Montana at that
+time. Where his life had been spent previous to that is not known, but
+it is thought that he came over from California. Plummer set up as a
+gambler, and this gave him the key to the brotherhood of the bad.
+Gamblers usually stick together pretty closely, and institute a sort of
+free-masonry of their own; so that Plummer was not long in finding,
+among men of his own profession and their associates, a number of others
+whom he considered safe to take into his confidence. Every man accepted
+by Plummer was a murderer. He would have no weaklings. No one can tell
+how many victims his associates had had before they went into his
+alliance; but it is sure that novices in man-killing were not desired,
+nor any who had not been proved of nerve. Plummer soon had so many men
+that he set up a rendezvous at points on all the trails leading out from
+Lewiston to such mines as were producing any gold. One robbery followed
+another, until the band threw off all restraint and ran the towns as
+they liked, paying for what they took when they felt like it, and
+laughing at the protests of the minority of the population, which was
+placed in the hard strait of being in that country and unable to get out
+without being robbed. It was the intention to seize the property of
+every man who was there and who was not accepted as a member of the
+gang.
+
+One killing after another occurred on the trails, and man after man was
+lost and never traced. Assaults were made upon many men who escaped, but
+no criminal could be located, and, indeed, there was no law by which any
+of them could be brought to book. The express riders were fired upon and
+robbed and the pack trains looted. No man expected to cross the mountain
+trails without meeting some of the robbers, and, when he did meet them,
+he expected to be killed if he made resistance, for they outnumbered the
+parties they attacked in nearly all instances. The outlaws were now
+indeed about three times as numerous as those not in sympathy with them.
+
+Rendered desperate by this state of affairs, a few resolute citizens who
+wanted law and order found each other out at last and organized into a
+vigilance committee, remembering the success of the Vigilantes of
+California, whose work was still recent history. Plummer himself was
+among the first to join this embryonic vigilante movement, as was the
+case in so many other similar movements in other parts of the West,
+where the criminal joined the law-loving in order to find out what the
+latter intended to do. His address was such as to disarm completely all
+suspicion, and he had full knowledge of facts which enabled him to
+murder for vengeance as well as for gain.
+
+After Oro Fino was worked out as a placer field, the prospectors located
+other grounds east of the Salmon River range, at Elk City and Florence,
+and soon Lewiston was forsaken, all the population trooping off over the
+mountains to the new fields. This broke up the vigilante movement in its
+infancy, and gave Plummer a longer lease of life for his plans. All
+those who had joined the vigilante movement were marked men. One after
+another they were murdered, none knew by whom, or why. Masked robbers
+were seen every day along the trails leading between one remote mining
+camp and another, but no one suspected Henry Plummer, who was serving
+well in his double role.
+
+Meantime, additional placer grounds had been discovered a hundred and
+fifty miles south of Florence, on the Boise river, and some valuable
+strikes were also made far to the north, at the upper waters of the
+Beaverhead. All the towns to the westward were now abandoned, and the
+miners left Florence as madly as they had rushed to it from Oro Fino and
+Elk City. West Bannack and East Bannack were now all the cry. To these
+new points, as may be supposed, the organized band of robbers fled with
+the others. Plummer, who had tried Elk City, Deer Lodge, and other
+points, now appeared at Bannack.
+
+One after another reports continued to come of placers discovered here
+and there in the upper Rockies. Among all these, the strikes on Gold
+Creek proved to be the most extensive and valuable. A few Eastern men,
+almost by accident, had found fair "pay" there, and returned to that
+locality when they found themselves unable to get across the
+snow-covered mountains to Florence. These few men at the Gold Creek
+diggings got large additions from expeditions made up in Denver and
+bound for Florence, who also were unable to get across the Salmon River
+mountains. Yet others came out in the summer of 1862, by way of the
+upper plains and the Missouri river, so that the accident of the season,
+so to speak, turned aside the traffic intended to reach Florence into
+quite another region. This fact, as events proved, had much to do with
+the later fate of Henry Plummer and his associates.
+
+These Eastern men were different from those who had been schooled in the
+mines of the Pacific Slope. They still clung to law and order; and they
+did not propose to be robbed. The first news of the strikes brought over
+the advance guard of the roughs who had been running the other camps;
+and, as soon as these were unmasked by acts of their own, the little
+advance guard of civilization shot one of them, Arnett, and hung two
+others, Jernigan and Spillman. This was the real beginning of a
+permanent vigilante force in Montana. It afforded perhaps the only known
+instance of a man being buried with a six-shooter in one hand and a hand
+of cards in the other. Arnett was killed in a game of cards, and died
+with his death grip thus fixed.
+
+The new diggings did not at first prove themselves, and the camp at
+Bannack, on Grasshopper Creek, was more prosperous. Henry Plummer,
+therefore, elected Bannack as his headquarters. Others of the loosely
+connected banditti began to drop into Bannack from other districts, and
+Plummer was soon surrounded by his clan and kin in crime. George Ives,
+Bill Mitchell, Charlie Reeves, Cy Skinner, and others began operations
+on the same lines which had so distinguished them at the earlier
+diggings, west of the range. In a few weeks Bannack was as bad as
+Lewiston or Florence had ever been. In fact, it became so bad that the
+Vigilantes began to show their teeth, although they confined their
+sentences to banishment. The black sheep and the white began now to be
+segregated.
+
+Plummer, shrewd to see the drift of opinion, saw that he must now play
+his hand out to the finish, that he could not now reform. He accordingly
+laid his plans to kill Jack Crawford, who was chosen as miners' sheriff.
+Plummer undertook one expedient after another to draw Crawford into a
+quarrel, in which he knew he could kill him; for Plummer's speed with
+the pistol had been proved when he killed Jack Cleveland, one of his own
+best gun-fighters. Rumor ran that he was the best pistol shot in the
+Rockies and as bad a man as the worst. Plummer thought that Crawford
+suspected him of belonging to the bandits, and so doomed him. Crawford
+was wary, and defeated three separate attempts to waylay and kill him,
+besides avoiding several quarrels that were thrust upon him by Plummer
+or his men. Dick Phleger, a friend of Crawford, was also marked by
+Plummer, who challenged him to fight with pistols, as he frequently had
+challenged Crawford. Phleger was a braver man than Crawford, but he
+declined the duel. Plummer would have killed them both. He only wanted
+the appearance of an "even break," with the later plea of
+"self-defence," which has shielded so many bad men from punishment for
+murder.
+
+Plummer now tried treachery, and told Crawford they would be friends.
+All the time he was hunting a chance to kill him. At length he held
+Crawford up in a restaurant, and stood waiting for him with a rifle. A
+friend handed Crawford a rifle, and the latter slipped up and took a
+shot from the corner of the house at Plummer, who was across the street.
+The ball struck Plummer's right arm and tore it to pieces. Crawford
+missed him with a second shot, and Plummer walked back to his own
+cabin. Here he had a long siege with his wound, refusing to allow his
+arm to be amputated, since he knew he might as well be dead as so
+crippled. He finally recovered, although the ball was never removed and
+the bone never knit. The ball lodged in his wrist and was found there
+after his death, worn smooth as silver by the action of the bones.
+Crawford escaped down the Missouri river, to which he fled at Fort
+Benton. He never came back to the country. Plummer went on practising
+with the six-shooter with his left hand, and became a very good
+left-hand shot. He knew that his only safety lay in his skill with
+weapons.
+
+Plummer's physician was Dr. Glick, who operated under cover of a
+shotgun, and with the cheerful assurance that if he killed Plummer by
+accident, he himself would be killed. After that Glick dressed the
+wounds of more than one outlaw, but dared not tell of it. Plummer
+admitted to him at last that these were his men and told Glick he would
+kill him if he ever breathed a word of this confidence. So the knowledge
+of the existence of the banditti was known to one man for a long time.
+
+As to Bannack, it was one of the wildest camps ever known in any land.
+Pistol fire was heard incessantly, and one victim after another was
+added to the list. George Ives, Johnny Cooper, George Carrhart, Hayes
+Lyons, Cy Skinner, and others of the toughs were now open associates of
+the leading spirit, Plummer. The condition of lawlessness and terror was
+such that all the decent men would have gone back to the States, but the
+same difficulties that had kept them from getting across to Florence now
+kept them from getting back East. The winter held them prisoners.
+
+Henry Plummer was now elected sheriff for the Bannack mining district,
+to succeed Crawford, whom he had run out of the country. It seems very
+difficult to understand how this could have occurred; but it will serve
+to show the numerical strength of Plummer's party. The latter, now
+married, professed to have reformed. In reality, he was deeper in
+deviltry than ever in his life.
+
+The diggings at Gold Creek and Bannack were now eclipsed by the
+sensational discoveries on the famous Alder Gulch, one of the phenomenal
+placers of the world, and the most productive ever known in America. The
+stampede was fast and furious to these new diggings. In ten days the
+gulch was staked out for twelve miles, and the cabins of the miners
+were occupied for all of that distance, and scattered over a long, low
+flat, whose vegetation was quickly swept away. The new camp that sprung
+up on one end of this bar was called Virginia City. It need not be said
+that among the first settlers there were the outlaws earlier mentioned,
+with several others: Jack Gallagher, Buck Stinson, Ned Ray, and others,
+these three named being "deputies" of "Sheriff" Plummer. A sort of court
+was formed for trying disputed mining claims. Charley Forbes was clerk
+of this court, and incidentally one of Plummer's band! This clerk and
+these deputies killed one Dillingham, whom they suspected of informing a
+friend of a robbery planned to make away with him on the trail from
+Bannack to Virginia City. They were "tried" by the court and freed.
+Hayes Lyons admitted privately that Plummer had told him to kill the
+informer Dillingham. The invariable plan of this bloodthirsty man was to
+destroy unfavorable testimony by means of death.
+
+The unceasing flood of gold from the seemingly exhaustless gulch caused
+three or four more little camps or towns to spring up; but Virginia City
+now took the palm for frontier reputation in hardness. Ten millions in
+"dust" was washed out in one year. Every one had gold, sacks and cans of
+it. The wild license of the place was unspeakably vitiating. Fights with
+weapons were incessant. Rude dance halls and saloons were crowded with
+truculent, armed men in search of trouble. Churches and schools were
+unknown. Tents, log cabins, and brush shanties made the residences.
+"Hacks rattled to and fro between the several towns, freighted with
+drunken and rowdy humanity of both sexes. Citizens of acknowledged
+respectability often walked, more often perhaps rode side by side on
+horseback, with noted courtesans, in open day, through the crowded
+streets, and seemingly suffered no harm in reputation. Pistols flashed,
+bowie-knives flourished, oaths filled the air. This was indeed the reign
+of unbridled license, and men who at first regarded it with disgust and
+terror, by constant exposure soon learned to become part of it, and to
+forget that they had ever been aught else. Judges, lawyers, doctors,
+even clergymen, could not claim exemption."
+
+This was in 1863. At that time, the nearest capitals were Olympia, on
+Puget Sound; Yankton, two thousand miles away; and Lewiston, seven
+hundred miles away. What machinery of the law was there to hinder
+Plummer and his men? What better field than this one, literally
+overflowing with gold, could they have asked for their operations? And
+what better chief than Plummer?
+
+His next effort was to be appointed deputy United States marshal, and he
+received the indorsement of the leading men of Bannack. Plummer
+afterward tried several times to kill Nathaniel P. Langford, who caused
+his defeat, but was unsuccessful in getting the opportunity he sought.
+
+From Bannack to Salt Lake City was about five hundred miles. Mails by
+this time came in from Salt Lake City, which was the supply point. If a
+man wanted to send out gold to his people in the States, it had to go
+over this long trail across the wild regions. There was no mail service,
+and no express office nearer than Salt Lake. Merchants sent out their
+funds by private messenger. Every such journey was a risk of death.
+Plummer had clerks in every institution that was making money, and these
+kept him posted as to the times when shipments of dust were about to be
+made; they also told him when any well-staked miner was going out to
+the States. Plummer's men were posted all along these mountain trails.
+No one will ever know how many men were killed in all on the Salt Lake
+trail.
+
+There was a stage also between Bannack and Virginia City, and this was
+regarded as a legitimate and regular booty producer by the gang.
+Whenever a rich passenger took stage, a confederate at the place put a
+mark on the vehicle so that it could be read at the next stop. At this
+point there was sure to be others of the gang, who attended to further
+details. Sometimes two or three thousand dollars would be taken from a
+single passenger. A stage often carried fifteen or twenty thousand
+dollars in dust. Plummer knew when and where and how each stage was
+robbed, but in his capacity as sheriff covered up the traces of all his
+associates.
+
+The robbers who did the work were usually masked, and although
+suspicions were rife and mutterings began to grow louder, there was no
+actual evidence against Plummer until one day he held up a young man by
+name of Tilden, who voiced his belief that he knew the man who had held
+him up. Further evidence was soon to follow. A pack-train, bound for
+Salt Lake, had no less than eighty thousand dollars in dust in its
+charge, and Plummer had sent out Dutch John and Steve Marshland to hold
+up the train. The freighters were too plucky, and both the bandits were
+wounded, and so marked, although for the time they escaped. George Ives
+also was recognized by one or two victims and began to be watched on
+account of his numerous open murders.
+
+At length, the dead body of a young man named Tiebalt was found in a
+thicket near Alder Gulch, under circumstances showing a revolting
+murder. At last the slumbering spirit of the Vigilantes began to awaken.
+Two dozen men of the camp went out and arrested Long John, George Ives,
+Alex Carter, Whiskey Bill, Bob Zachary, and Johnny Cooper. These men
+were surprised in their camp, and among their long list of weapons were
+some that had been taken from men who had been robbed or murdered. These
+weapons were identified by friends. Old Tex was another man taken in
+charge, and George Hilderman yet another. All these men wanted a "jury
+trial," and wanted it at Virginia City, where Plummer would have
+official influence enough to get his associates released! The captors,
+however, were men from Nevada, the other leading camp in Alder Gulch,
+and they took their prisoners there.
+
+At once a Plummer man hastened out on horseback to get the chief on the
+ground, riding all night across the mountains to Bannack to carry the
+news that the citizens had at last rebelled against anarchy, robbery,
+and murder. On the following morning, two thousand men had gathered at
+Nevada City, and had resolved to try the outlaws. As there was rivalry
+between Virginia and Nevada camps, a jury was made up of twenty-four
+men, twelve from each camp. The miners' court, most dread of all
+tribunals, was in session.
+
+Some forms of the law were observed. Long John was allowed to turn
+state's evidence. He swore that George Ives had killed Tiebalt, and
+declared that he shot him while Tiebalt was on his knees praying, after
+he had been told that he must die. Then a rope was put around his neck
+and he was dragged to a place of concealment in the thicket where the
+body was found. Tiebalt was not dead while so dragged, for his hands
+were found full of grass and twigs which he had clutched. Ives was
+condemned to death, and the law and order men were strong enough to
+suppress the armed disturbance at once started by his friends, none of
+whom could realize that the patient citizens were at last taking the law
+into their own hands. A scaffold was improvised and Ives was hung,--the
+first of the Plummer gang to meet retribution. The others then in
+custody were allowed to go under milder sentences.
+
+The Vigilantes now organized with vigor and determination. One bit of
+testimony was added to another, and one man now dared to voice his
+suspicions to another. Twenty-five determined men set out to secure
+others of the gang now known to have been united in this long
+brotherhood. Some of these men were now fleeing the country, warned by
+the fate of Ives; but the Vigilantes took Red Yager and Buck Stinson and
+Ned Ray, two of them Plummer's deputies, as well as another confederate
+named Brown. The party stopped at the Lorain Ranch, near a cottonwood
+grove, and tried their prisoners without going into town. Red Yager
+confessed in full before he was hung, and it was on his testimony that
+the whole secret league of robbers was exposed and eventually brought to
+justice. He gave the following list:
+
+Henry Plummer was chief of the gang; Bill Bunton, stool-pigeon and
+second in command; George Brown, secretary; Sam Bunton, roadster; Cyrus
+Skinner, fence, spy and roadster; George Shears, horse thief and
+roadster; Frank Parish, horse thief and roadster; Bill Hunter, telegraph
+man and roadster; Ned Ray, council-room keeper at Bannack City; George
+Ives, Stephen Marshland, Dutch John (Wagner), Alex Carter, Whiskey Bill
+(Graves), Johnny Cooper, Buck Stinson, Mexican Frank, Bob Zachary, Boone
+Helm, Clubfoot George (Lane), Billy Terwilliger, Gad Moore, were
+roadsters.
+
+The noose was now tightening around the neck of the outlaw, Henry
+Plummer, whose adroitness had so long stood him in good stead. The
+honest miners found that their sheriff was the leader of the outlaws!
+His doom was said then and there, with that of all these others.
+
+A party of the Virginia City law and order men slipped over to Bannack,
+Henry Plummer's home. In a few hours the news had spread of what had
+happened at the other camps, and a branch organization of the Vigilantes
+was formed for Bannack. Stinson and Ray were now arrested, and then
+Plummer himself, the chief, the brains of all this long-secret band of
+marauders. He was surprised with his coat and arms off, and taken
+prisoner. A few moments later, he was facing a scaffold, where, as
+sheriff, he had lately hung a man. The law had no delays. No court could
+quibble here. Not all Plummer's wealth could save him now, nor all his
+intellect and cool audacity.
+
+An agony of remorse and fear now came upon the outlaw chief. He fell
+upon his knees, called upon God to save him, begged, pleaded, wept like
+a child, declared that he was too wicked to die thus soon and
+unprepared. It was useless. The full proof of all his many crimes was
+laid before him.
+
+Ray, writhing and cursing, was the first to be hanged. He got his finger
+under the rope around his neck and died hard, but died. Stinson, also
+cursing, went next. It was then time for Plummer, and those who had this
+work in hand felt compunction at hanging a man so able, so urbane and so
+commanding. None the less, he was told to prepare. He asked for time to
+pray, and was told to pray from the cross-beam. He said good-by to a
+friend or two, and asked his executioners to "give him a good drop." He
+seemed to fear suffering, he who had caused so much suffering. To oblige
+him, the men lifted his body high up and let it fall, and he died with
+little struggle.
+
+To cut short a long story of bloody justice, it may be added that of the
+men named as guilty by Yager every one was arrested, tried, and hung by
+the Vigilantes. Plummer for some time must have dreaded detection, for
+he tried to cover up his guilt by writing back home to the States that
+he was in danger of being hanged on account of his Union sympathies. His
+family would not believe his guilt, and looked on him as a martyr. They
+sent out a brother and sister to look into the matter, but these too
+found proof which left them no chance to doubt. The whole ghastly
+revelation of a misspent life lay before them. Even Plummer's wife, whom
+he loved very much and who was a good woman, was at last convinced of
+what at first she could not believe. Plummer had been able to conceal
+from even his wife the least suspicion that he was not an honorable man.
+His wife was east in the States at the time of his death.
+
+Plummer went under his true name. George Ives was a Wisconsin boy from
+near Racine. Both he and Plummer were twenty-seven years of age when
+killed, but they had compressed much evil into so short a span. Plummer
+himself was a master of men, a brave and cool spirit, an expert with
+weapons, and in all not a bad specimen of the bad man at his worst. He
+was a murderer, but after all was not enough a murderer. No outlaw of
+later years so closely resembled the great outlaw, John A. Murrell, as
+did Henry Plummer, but the latter differed in one regard:--he spared
+victims, who later arose to accuse him.
+
+The frontier has produced few bloodier records than Plummer's. He was
+principal or accessory, as has been stated, in more than one hundred
+murders, not to mention innumerable robberies and thefts. His life was
+lived out in scenes typical of the early Western frontier. The madness
+of adventure in new wild fields, the lust of gold and its unparalleled
+abundance drove to crime men who might have been respected and of note
+in proper ranks of life and in other surroundings.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII
+
+Boone Helm--_A Murderer, Cannibal, and Robber_--_A Typical Specimen of
+Absolute Human Depravity_.
+
+
+Henry Plummer was what might be called a good instance of the gentleman
+desperado, if such a thing be possible; a man of at least a certain
+amount of refinement, and certainly one who, under different
+surroundings, might have led a different life. For the sake of contrast,
+if for nothing else, we may take the case of Boone Helm, one of
+Plummer's gang, who was the opposite of Plummer in every way except the
+readiness to rob and kill. Boone Helm was bad, and nothing in the world
+could ever have made him anything but bad. He was, by birth and
+breeding, low, coarse, cruel, animal-like and utterly depraved, and for
+him no name but ruffian can fitly apply.
+
+Helm was born in Kentucky, but his family moved to Missouri during his
+early youth, so that the boy was brought up on the borderland between
+civilization and the savage frontier; for this was about the time of the
+closing days of the old Santa Fe Trail, and the towns of Independence
+and Westport were still sending out their wagon trains to the far
+mountain regions. By the time Boone Helm was grown, and soon after his
+marriage, the great gold craze of California broke out, and he joined
+the rush westward. Already he was a murderer, and already he had a
+reputation as a quarrelsome and dangerous man. He was of powerful build
+and turbulent temper, delighting in nothing so much as feats of
+strength, skill, and hardihood. His community was glad to be rid of him,
+as was, indeed, any community in which he ever lived.
+
+In the California diggings, Helm continued the line of life mapped out
+for him from birth. He met men of his own kidney there, and was ever
+ready for a duel with weapons. In this way he killed several men, no one
+knows how many; but this sort of thing was so common in the case of so
+many men in those days that little attention was paid to it. It must
+have been a very brutal murder which at length caused him to flee the
+Coast to escape the vengeance of the miners. He headed north and east,
+after a fashion of the times following the California boom, and was
+bound for the mountain placers in 1853, when he is recorded as appearing
+at the Dalles, Oregon. He and a half-dozen companions, whom he had
+picked up on the way, and most of whom were strangers to each other, now
+started out for Fort Hall, Idaho, intending to go from there to a point
+below Salt Lake City.
+
+The beginning of the terrible mountain winter season caught these men
+somewhere west of the main range in eastern Oregon, in the depths of as
+rugged a mountain region as any of the West. They were on horseback, and
+so could carry small provisions; but in some way they pushed on deeper
+and deeper into the mountains, until they got to the Bannack river,
+where they were attacked by Indians and chased into a country none of
+them knew. At last they got over east as far as the Soda Springs on the
+Bear river, where they were on well-known ground. By this time, however,
+their horses had given out, and their food was exhausted. They killed
+their horses, made snowshoes with the hides, and sought to reach Fort
+Hall. The party was now reduced to one of those awful starving marches
+of the wilderness which are now and then chronicled in Western life.
+This meant that the weak must perish where they fell.
+
+The strength of Helm and one of the others, Burton, enabled them to push
+on ahead, leaving their companions behind in the mountains. Almost
+within reach of Fort Hall, Burton gave out and was left behind in an
+abandoned cabin. Helm pushed on into the old stockade, but found it also
+abandoned for the winter season, and he could get no food there. He then
+went back to where he had left Burton, and, according to his own report,
+he was trying to get wood for a fire when he heard a pistol-shot and
+returned to find that Burton had killed himself. He stayed on at this
+spot, and, like a hyena, preyed upon the dead body of his companion. He
+ate one leg of the body, and then, wrapping up the other in a piece of
+old shirt, threw it across his shoulder and started on further east. He
+had, before this on the march, declared to the party that he had
+practiced cannibalism at an earlier time, and proposed to do so again if
+it became necessary on this trip across the mountains. His calm threat
+was now verified. Helm was found at last at an Indian camp by John W.
+Powell, who learned that he was as hard a character as he had ever run
+across. None the less, he took care of Helm, gave him food and clothes,
+and took him to the settlements around Salt Lake. Powell found that Helm
+had a bag containing over fourteen hundred dollars in coin, which he had
+carried across the divide with him through all his hardships. He would
+take no pay from Helm, and the latter never even thanked him for his
+kindness, but left him as soon as he reached the Mormon settlements.
+
+Here the abandoned ruffian boasted of what he had done, and settled down
+for a brief time to the customary enjoyments of the rough when in town.
+He spent his money, hired out as a Danite, killed a couple of men whom
+the Mormons wanted removed, and soon got so bad that he had to leave.
+Once more he headed west to California, and once more he started back
+north from San Francisco, for reasons satisfactory to himself. While in
+California, as was later learned, he undertook to rob and kill a man at
+an outlying ranch, who had taken him in and befriended him when he was
+in need and in flight from vengeance. He showed no understanding of the
+feeling of gratitude, no matter what was done for him or how great was
+his own extremity.
+
+In Oregon Helm went back to robbery as his customary means of support,
+and he killed several men at this time of his life, how many will never
+be known. In 1862, as the mountain placers were now beginning to draw
+the crowds of mining men, it was natural that Boone Helm should show up
+at Florence. Here he killed a man in cold blood, in treachery, while his
+enemy was not armed, and after their quarrel had been compromised. This
+victim was Dutch Fred, a man of reputation as a fighter, but he had
+never offended Helm, who killed him at the instigation of an enemy of
+his victim, and possibly for hire. He shot Fred while the latter stood
+looking him in the face, unarmed, and, missing him with the first shot,
+took deliberate aim with the second and murdered his man in cold blood.
+
+This was pretty bad even for Florence, and he had to leave. That fall he
+turned up far to the north, on the Fraser river, in British Columbia.
+Here he was once more reduced to danger on a starving foot march in the
+wilderness, and here, once more, he was guilty of eating the body of
+his companion, whom he is supposed to have slain. He was sent back by
+the British authorities, and for a time was held at Portland, Oregon,
+for safe keeping. Later he was tried at Florence for killing Dutch Fred,
+but the witnesses had disappeared, and people had long ago lost interest
+in the crime by reason of others more recent. Helm escaped justice and
+was supposed to have gone to Texas; but he soon appeared in the several
+settlements which have been mentioned in the foregoing pages, and moved
+from one to the other. He killed many more men, how many in all was
+never known.
+
+The courage and hardihood of Boone Helm were in evidence to the close of
+his life. Three men of the Vigilantes did the dangerous work of
+arresting him, and took him by closing in on him as he stood in the
+street talking. "If I'd had a chance," said he, "or if I had guessed
+what you all were up to, you'd never have taken me." He claimed not to
+know what was wanted of him when brought before the judges of the
+Vigilante court, and solemnly declared that he had never killed a man in
+all his life! They made him kiss the Bible and swear to this over again
+just to see to what lengths his perjured and depraved soul would go. He
+swore on the Bible with perfect calmness! His captors were not moved by
+this, and indeed Helm was little expectant that they would be. He called
+aside one of them whom he knew, declined a clergyman, and confessed to a
+murder or so in Missouri and in California, admitted that he had been
+imprisoned once or twice, but denied that he had been a road agent. He
+accused some of his warmest friends of the latter crime. Jack Gallegher,
+also under arrest, heard him thus incriminate himself and others of the
+gang and called him all the names in the calendar, telling him he ought
+to die.
+
+"I have looked at death in all forms," said Helm, coolly, "and I am not
+afraid to die." He then asked for a glass of whiskey, as did a good many
+of these murderers when they were brought to the gallows. From that time
+on he was cool and unconcerned, and showed a finish worthy of one
+ambitious to be thought wholly bad.
+
+There were six thousand men assembled in Virginia City to see the
+executions of these criminals, who were fast being rounded up and hung
+by the citizens. The place of execution was in a half-finished log
+building. The ropes were passed over the ridge-pole, and, as the front
+of the building was open, a full view was offered of the murderers as
+they stood on the boxes arranged for the drops. Boone Helm looked around
+at his friends placed for death, and told Jack Gallegher to "stop making
+such a fuss." "There's no use being afraid to die," said he; and indeed
+there probably never lived a man more actually devoid of all sense of
+fear. He valued neither the life of others nor his own. He saw that the
+end had come, and was careless about the rest. He had a sore finger,
+which was tied up, and this seemed to trouble him more than anything
+else. There was some delay about the confessions and the last offices of
+those who prayed for the condemned, and this seemed to irritate Boone
+Helm.
+
+"For God's sake," said he, "if you're going to hang me, I want you to do
+it and get through with it. If not, I want you to tie up my finger for
+me."
+
+"Give me that overcoat of yours, Jack," he said to Gallegher, as the
+latter was stripped for the noose.
+
+"You won't need it now," replied Gallegher, who was dying blasphemous.
+About then, George Lane, one of the line of men about to be hung,
+jumped off his box on his own account. "There's one gone to hell,"
+remarked Boone Helm, philosophically. Gallegher was hanged next, and as
+he struggled his former friend watched him calmly. "Kick away, old
+fellow," said Boone Helm. Then, as though suddenly resolved to end it,
+he commented, "My turn next. I'll be in hell with you in a minute!"
+
+Boone Helm was a Confederate and a bitter one, and this seems to have
+remained with him to the last. "Every man for his principles!" he
+shouted. "Hurrah for Jeff Davis! Let her rip!" He sprang off the box;
+and so he finished, utterly hard and reckless to the last.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IX
+
+Death Scenes of Desperadoes--_How Bad Men Died_--_The Last Moments of
+Desperadoes Who Finished on the Scaffold_--_Utterances of Terror, of
+Defiance, and of Cowardice_.
+
+
+There is always a grim sort of curiosity regarding the way in which
+notoriously desperate men meet their end; and perhaps this is as natural
+as is the curiosity regarding the manner in which they lived. "Did he
+die game?" is one of the questions asked by bad men among themselves.
+"Did he die with his boots on?" is another. The last was the test of
+actual or, as it were, of professional badness. One who admitted himself
+bad was willing to die with his boots on. Honest men were not, and more
+than one early Western man fatally shot had his friends take off his
+boots before he died, so that he might not go with the stain of
+desperadoism attached to his name.
+
+Some bad men died unrepentant and defiant. Others broke down and wept
+and begged. A great oblivion enshrouds most of these utterances, for few
+Vigilante movements ever reached importance enough to permit those who
+participated to make publicly known their own participation in them.
+Indeed, no man ever concerned in a law and order execution ever liked to
+talk about it. Tradition, however, has preserved the exact utterances of
+many bad men. Report is preserved, in a general way, of many of the
+rustlers hung by the cattle men in the "regulator" movement in Montana,
+Wyoming, and Nebraska in the late '70's. "Give me a chew of tobacco,
+folks," said one. "Meet you in hell, fellows," remarked others of these
+rustlers when the last moment arrived. "So-long, boys," was a not
+infrequent remark as the noose tightened. Many of these men were brave,
+and some of them were hung for what they considered no crime.
+
+Henry Plummer, whose fate has been described in a previous chapter, was
+one of those who died in a sense of guilt and terror. His was a nature
+of some sensitiveness, not callous like that of Boone Helm. Plummer
+begged for life on any terms, asked the Vigilantes to cut off his
+ears and hands and tongue, anything to mark him and leave him helpless,
+but to leave him alive. He protested that he was too wicked to die, fell
+on his knees, cried aloud, promised, besought. On the whole, his end
+hardly left him enshrouded with much glamor of courage; although the
+latter term is relative in the bad man, who might be brave at one time
+and cowardly at another, as was often proved.
+
+[Illustration: THE SCENE OF MANY HANGINGS]
+
+Ned Ray and Buck Stinson died full of profanity and curses, heaping upon
+their executioners all manner of abuse. They seemed to be animated by no
+understanding of a life hereafter, and were concerned only in their
+animal instinct to hold on to this one as long as they might. Yet
+Stinson, of a good Indiana family, was a bright and studious and
+well-read boy, of whom many good things had been predicted.
+
+Dutch John, when faced with death, acted much as his chief, Henry
+Plummer, had done. He begged and pleaded, and asked for mutilation,
+disfigurement, anything, if only he might still live. But, like Plummer,
+at the very last moment he pulled together and died calmly. "How long
+will it take me to die?" he asked. "I have never seen anyone hanged."
+They told him it would be very short and that he would not suffer much,
+and this seemed to please him. Nearly all these desperadoes seemed to
+dread death by hanging. The Territory of Utah allowed a felon convicted
+under death penalty to choose the manner of his death, whether by
+hanging, beheading, or shooting; but no record remains of any prisoner
+who did not choose death by shooting. A curiosity as to the sensation of
+hanging was evinced in the words of several who were hung by Vigilantes.
+
+In the largest hanging made in this Montana work, there were five men
+executed one after the other: Clubfoot George, Hayes Lyons, Jack
+Gallegher, Boone Helm, and Frank Parish, all known to be members of the
+Plummer gang. George and Parish at first declared that they were
+innocent--the first word of most of these men when they were
+apprehended. Parish died silent. George had spent some hours with a
+clergyman, and was apparently repentant. Just as he reached the box, he
+saw a friend peering through a crack in the wall. "Good-by, old fellow,"
+he called out, and sprang to his own death without waiting for the box
+to be pulled from under his feet.
+
+Hayes Lyons asked to see his mistress to say good-by to her before he
+died, but was refused. He kept on pleading for his life to the very last
+instant, after he had told the men to take his body to his mistress for
+burial. This woman was really the cause of Lyons' undoing. He had been
+warned, and would have left the country but for her. A woman was very
+often the cause of a desperado's apprehension.
+
+Jack Gallegher in his last moments was, if possible, more repulsive even
+than Boone Helm. The latter was brave, but Gallegher was a coward, and
+spent his time in cursing his captors and pitying himself. He tried to
+be merry. "How do I look with a halter around my neck?" he asked
+facetiously of a bystander. He asked often for whiskey and this was
+given him. A moment later he said, "I want one more drink of whiskey
+before I die." This was when the noose was tight around his neck, and
+the men were disgusted with him for the remark. One remarked, "Give him
+the whiskey"; so the rope, which was passed over the beam above him and
+fastened to a side log of the building, was loosened to oblige him.
+"Slack off the rope, can't you," cried Gallegher, "and let a man have a
+parting drink." He bent his head down against the rope and drank a
+tumblerful of whiskey at a gulp. Then he called down curses on the men
+who were about him, and kept it up until they cut him short by jerking
+away the box from under his feet.
+
+A peculiar instance of unconscious, but grim, humor was afforded at
+Gallegher's execution. Just as he was led to the box and ordered to
+climb up, he drew a pocket-knife and declared he would kill himself and
+not be hanged in public. A Vigilante covered him with a six-shooter.
+"Drop that, Jack," he exclaimed, "or I'll blow your head off." So
+Gallegher, having the choice of death between shooting, hanging or
+beheading, chose hanging after all! He was a coward.
+
+Cy Skinner, when on the way to the scaffold, broke and ran, calling on
+his captors to shoot. They declined, and hanged him. Alex Carter, who
+was on the fatal line with Skinner in that lot, was disgusted with him
+for running. He asked for a smoke while the men were waiting, and died
+with a lie on his lips--"I am innocent." That is not an infrequent
+declaration of criminals at the last. The lie is only a blind clinging
+to the last possible means of escape, and is the same as the instinct
+for self-preservation, a crime swallowed up in guilt.
+
+Johnny Cooper wanted a "good smoke" before he died, and was given it.
+Bob Zachary died without fear, and praying forgiveness on his
+executioners. Steve Marshland asked to be pardoned because of his youth.
+"You should have thought of that before," was the grim reply. He was
+adjudged old enough to die, as he had been old enough to kill.
+
+George Shears was one of the gamest of the lot. He seemed indifferent
+about it all after his capture, and, when he was told that he was to be
+hanged, he remarked that he ought to be glad it was no worse. He was
+executed in the barn at a ranch where he was caught, and, conveniences
+being few, a ladder was used instead of a box or other drop. He was told
+to ascend the latter, and did so without the least hesitation or
+evidence of concern. "Gentlemen," said he, "I am not used to this
+business, never having been hung before. Shall I jump off or slide off?"
+They told him to "jump, of course," and he took this advice. "All right.
+Good-by!" he said, and sprang off with unconcern.
+
+Whiskey Bill was not given much chance for last words. He was hung from
+horseback, the noose being dropped down from a tree to his neck as he
+sat on a horse behind one of the Vigilantes. "Good-by, Bill," was the
+remark of the latter, as he spurred his horse and left Bill hanging.
+
+One of the most singular phenomena of these executions was that of Bill
+Hunter, who, while hanging by the neck, went through all the motions of
+drawing and firing his six-shooter six times. Whether the action was
+conscious or unconscious it is impossible to tell.
+
+Bill Bunton resisted arrest and was pugnacious, of course declaring his
+innocence. At the last he showed great gameness. He was particular about
+the manner in which the knot of the rope was adjusted to his neck,
+seeming, as did many of these men, to dread any suffering while hanging.
+He asked if he might jump off the platform himself, and was told he
+might if he liked. "I care no more for hanging," he explained, "than I
+do for taking a drink of water, but I'd like to have my neck broken. I'd
+like to have a mountain three hundred feet high to jump off from. Now,
+I'll give you the time: One--two--three. Here goes!"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter X
+
+Joseph A. Slade--_A Man with a Newspaper Reputation_--_Bad, but Not as
+Bad as Painted_--_Hero of the Overland Express Route_--_A Product of
+Courage Plus Whiskey, and the End of the Product_.
+
+
+One of the best-known desperadoes the West ever produced was Joseph A.
+Slade, agent of the Overland stage line on the central or mountain
+division, about 1860, and hence in charge of large responsibilities in a
+strip of country more than six hundred miles in extent, which possessed
+all the ingredients for trouble in plenty. Slade lived, in the heyday of
+his career, just about the time when men from the East were beginning to
+write about the newly discovered life of the West. Bret Harte had left
+his indelible stamp upon the literature of the land, and Mark Twain was
+soon to spread widely his impressions of life as seen in "Roughing It";
+while countless newspaper men and book writers were edging out and
+getting hearsay stories of things known at first hand by a very few
+careful and conscientious writers.
+
+The hearsay man engaged in discovering the West always clung to the
+regular lines of travel; and almost every one who passed across the
+mountains on the Overland stage line would hear stories about the
+desperate character of Slade. These stories grew by newspaper
+multiplication, until at length the man was owner of the reputation of a
+fiend, a ghoul, and a murderer. There was a wide difference between this
+and the truth. As a matter of fact, there were many worse desperadoes on
+the border.
+
+Slade was born at Carlisle, Illinois, and served in the Mexican War in
+1848. He appears to have gone into the Overland service in 1859. At once
+he plunged into the business of the stage line, and soon became a terror
+to the thieves and outlaws, several of whom he was the means of having
+shot or hung, although he himself was nothing of a man-hunter at the
+time; and indeed, in all his life he killed but one man--a case of a
+reputation beyond desert, and an instance of a reputation fostered by
+admiring but ignorant writers.
+
+Slade was reported to have tied one of his enemies, Jules Reni, more
+commonly called Jules, to the stake, and to have tortured him for a day,
+shooting him to pieces bit by bit, and cutting off his ears, one of
+which he always afterward wore in his pocket as a souvenir. There was
+little foundation for this reputation beyond the fact that he did kill
+Jules, and did it after Jules had been captured and disarmed by other
+men. But he had been threatened time and again by Jules, and was once
+shot and left for dead by the latter, who emptied a pistol and a shotgun
+at Slade, and left him lying with thirteen bullets and buckshot in his
+body. Jules thought he did not need to shoot Slade any more after that,
+and gave directions for his burial as soon as he should have died. At
+that Slade rose on his elbow and promised Jules he would live and would
+wear one of his, Jules', ears on his watch chain; a threat which no
+doubt gave rise to a certain part of his ghastly reputation. Jules was
+hung for a while by the stage people, but was let down and released on
+promise of leaving the country never to return. He did not keep his
+promise, and it had been better for him if he had.
+
+Jules Reni was a big Frenchman, one of that sort of early ranchers who
+were owners of small ranches and a limited number of cattle and
+horses--just enough to act as a shield for thefts of live stock, and to
+offer encouragement to such thefts. Before long Jules was back at his
+old stamping-grounds, where he was looked on as something of a bully;
+and at once he renewed his threats against Slade.
+
+Slade went to the officers of the military post at Laramie, the only
+kind of authority then in the land, which had no sort of courts or
+officers, and asked them what he should do. They told him to have Jules
+captured and then to kill him, else Jules would do the same for him.
+Slade sent four men out to the ranch where Jules was stopping, about
+twelve miles from Laramie, while he followed in the stage-coach. These
+men captured Jules at a ranch a little farther down the line, and left
+him prisoner at the stage station. Here Slade found him in the corral, a
+prisoner, unarmed and at his mercy, and without hesitation he shot him,
+the ball striking him in the mouth. His victim fell and feigned death,
+but Slade--who was always described as a good pistol shot--saw that he
+was not killed, and told him he should have time to make his will if he
+desired. There is color in the charge of deliberate cruelty, but
+perhaps rude warrant for the cruelty, under the circumstances of
+treachery in which Jules had pursued Slade. At least, some time elapsed
+while a man was running back and forward from the house to the corral
+with pen and ink and paper. Jules never signed his will. When the last
+penful of ink came out to the corral, Jules was dead, shot through the
+head by Slade. This looks like cruelty of an unnecessary sort, and like
+taunting a helpless victim; but here the warrant for all the Slade sort
+of stories seems to end, and there is no evidence of his mutilating his
+victim, as was often described.
+
+Slade went back to the officers of Fort Laramie, and they said he had
+done right and did not detain him. Nor did any of Jules' friends ever
+molest him. He returned to his work on the Overland. After this he grew
+more turbulent, and was guilty of high-handed outrages and of a general
+disposition to run things wherever he went. The officers at Fort Halleck
+arrested him and refused to turn him over to the stage line unless the
+latter agreed to discharge him. This was done, and now Slade, out of
+work, began to be bad at heart. He took to drink and drifting, and so at
+last turned up at the Beaverhead diggings in 1863, not much different
+from many others of the bad folk to be found there.
+
+Quiet enough when sober, Slade was a maniac in drink, and this latter
+became his habitual condition. Now and again he sobered up, and he
+always was a business man and animated by an ambition to get on in the
+world. He worked here and there in different capacities, and at last
+settled on a ranch a dozen miles or so from Virginia City, where he
+lived with his wife, a robust, fine-looking woman of great courage and
+very considerable beauty, of whom he was passionately fond; although she
+lived almost alone in the remote cabin in the mountains, while Slade
+pursued his avocations, such as they were, in the settlements along
+Alder Gulch.
+
+Slade now began to grow ugly and hard, and to exult in terrorizing the
+hard men of those hard towns. He would strike a man in the face while
+drinking with him, would rob his friends while playing cards, would ride
+into the saloons and break up the furniture, and destroy property with
+seeming exultation at his own maliciousness. He was often arrested,
+warned, and fined; and sometimes he defied such officers as went after
+him and refused to be arrested. His whole conduct made him a menace to
+the peace of this little community, which was now endeavoring to become
+more decent, and he fell under the fatal scrutiny of the Vigilantes, who
+concluded that the best thing to do was to hang Slade. He had never
+killed anyone as yet, although he had abused many; but it was sure that
+he would kill some one if allowed to run on; and, moreover, it was
+humiliating to have one man trying to run the town and doing as he
+pleased. Slade was to learn what society means, and what the social
+compact means, as did many of these wild men who had been running as
+savages outside of and independent of the law. Slade got wind of the
+deliberations of the Committee, as well he might when six hundred men
+came down from Nevada Camp to Virginia City to help in the court of the
+miners, before which Slade was now to come. It was the Nevada Vigilantes
+who were most strongly of the belief that death and not banishment was
+the proper punishment for Slade. The leader of the marching men calmly
+told Slade that the Committee had decided to hang him; and, once the
+news was sure, Slade broke out into lamentations.
+
+This was often the case with men who had been bullies and terrors. They
+weakened when in the hands of a stronger power. Slade crept about on his
+hands and knees, begging like a baby. "My God! My God!" he cried. "Must
+I die? Oh, my poor wife, my poor wife! My God, men, you can't mean that
+I'm to die!"
+
+They did mean it, and neither his importunities nor those of his friends
+had avail. His life had been too rough and violent and was too full of
+menace to others. He had had his fair frontier chance and had misused
+it. Some wept at his prayers, but none relented. In broad daylight, the
+procession moved down the street, and soon Slade was swinging from the
+beam of a corral gate, one more example of the truth that when man
+belongs to society he owes duty to society and else must suffer at its
+hands. This was the law.
+
+Slade's wife was sent for and reached town soon after Slade's body was
+cut down and laid out. She loaded the Vigilantes with imprecations, and
+showed the most heartbroken grief. The two had been very deeply
+attached. She was especially regretful that Slade had been hanged and
+not shot. He was worth a better death than that, she protested.
+
+Slade's body was preserved in alcohol and kept out at the lone ranch
+cabin all that winter. In the spring it was sent down to Salt Lake City
+and buried there. As that was a prominent point on the overland trail,
+the tourists did the rest. The saga of Slade as a bad man was widely
+disseminated.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XI
+
+The Desperado of the Plains--_Lawlessness Founded on Loose
+Methods_--_The Rustlers of the Cow Country_--_Excuses for Their
+Acts_--_The Approach of the Commercial West_.
+
+
+One pronounced feature of early Western life will have been remarked in
+the story of the mountain settlements with which we have been concerned,
+and that is the transient and migratory character of the population. It
+is astonishing what distances were traveled by the bold men who followed
+the mining stampedes all over the wilderness of the upper Rockies, in
+spite of the unspeakable hardships of a region where travel at its best
+was rude, and travel at its worst well-nigh an impossibility. The West
+was first peopled by wanderers, nomads, even in its mountain regions,
+which usually attach their population to themselves and cut off the
+disposition to roam. This nomad nature of the adventurers made law
+almost an impossible thing. A town was organized and then abandoned, on
+the spur of necessity or rumor. Property was unstable, taxes impossible,
+and any corps of executive officers difficult of maintenance. Before
+there can be law there must be an attached population.
+
+The lawlessness of the real West was therefore much a matter of
+conditions after all, rather than of morals. It proved above all things
+that human nature is very much akin, and that good men may go wrong when
+sufficiently tempted by great wealth left unguarded. The first and
+second decades after the close of the civil war found the great placers
+of the Rockies and Sierras exhausted, and quartz mines taking their
+place. The same period, as has been shown, marked the advent of the
+great cattle herds from the South upon the upper ranges of the
+territories beyond the Missouri river. By this time, the plains began to
+call to the adventurers as the mines recently had called.
+
+Here, then, was wealth, loose, unattached, apparently almost unowned,
+nomad wealth, and waiting for a nomad population to share it in one way
+or another. Once more, the home was lacking, the permanent abode;
+wherefore, once more the law was also lacking, and man ruled himself
+after the ancient savage ways. By this time frontiersmen were well armed
+with repeating weapons, which now used fixed ammunition. There appeared
+on the plains more and better armed men than were ever known,
+unorganized, in any land at any period of the earth's history; and the
+plains took up what the mountains had begun in wild and desperate deeds.
+
+The only property on the arid plains at that time was that of live
+stock. Agriculture had not come, and it was supposed could never come.
+The vast herds of cattle from the lower ranges, Texas and Mexico, pushed
+north to meet the railroads, now springing westward across the plains;
+but a large proportion of these cattle were used as breeding stock to
+furnish the upper cow range with horned population. Colorado, Wyoming,
+Montana, western Nebraska, the Dakotas, discovered that they could raise
+range cattle as well as the southern ranges, and fatten them far better;
+so presently thousands upon thousands of cattle were turned loose,
+without a fence in those thousands of miles, to exist as best they
+might, and guarded as best might be by a class of men as nomadic as
+their herds. These cattle were cheap at that time, and they made a
+general source of food supply much appreciated in a land but just
+depopulated of its buffalo. For a long time it was but a venial crime to
+kill a cow and eat it if one were hungry. A man's horse was sacred, but
+his cow was not, because there were so many cows, and they were shifting
+and changing about so much at best.
+
+The ownership of these herds was widely scattered and difficult to
+trace. A man might live in Texas and have herds in Montana, and _vice
+versa_. His property right was known only by the brand upon the animal,
+his being but the tenure of a sign.
+
+"The respect for this sign was the whole creed of the cattle trade.
+Without a fence, without an atom of actual control, the cattle man held
+his property absolutely. It mingled with the property of others, but it
+was never confused therewith. It wandered a hundred miles from him, and
+he knew not where it was, but it was surely his and sure to find him. To
+touch it was crime. To appropriate it meant punishment. Common necessity
+made common custom, common custom made common law, and common law made
+statutory law."[E]
+
+[Footnote E: "The Story of the Cowboy," by E. Hough. D. Appleton & Co.
+New York.]
+
+The old _fierro_ or iron mark of the Spanish cattle owner, and his
+_venta_ or sale-brand to another had become common law all over the
+Southwest when the Anglo-Saxon first struck that region. The Saxon
+accepted these customs as wise and rational, and soon they were the
+American law all over the American plains.
+
+The great bands of cattle ran almost free in the Southwest for many
+years, each carrying the brand of the owner, if the latter had ever seen
+it or cared to brand it. Many cattle roamed free without any brand
+whatever, and no one could tell who owned them. When the northern ranges
+opened, this question of unbranded cattle still remained, and the
+"maverick" industry was still held matter of sanction, there seeming to
+be enough for all, and the day being one of glorious freedom and plenty,
+the baronial day of the great and once unexhausted West.
+
+Now the _venta_, or brand indicating the sale of an animal to another
+owner, began to complicate matters to a certain extent. A purchaser
+could put his own _fierro_ brand on a cow, and that meant that he now
+owned it. But then some suspicious soul asked, "How shall we know whence
+such and such cows came, and how tell whether or not this man did not
+steal them outright from his neighbor's herd and put his own brand on
+them?" Here was the origin of the bill of sale, and also of the counter
+brand or "vent brand," as it is known upon the upper ranges. The owner
+duplicated his recorded brand upon another recorded part of the animal,
+and this meant his deed of conveyance, when taken together with the bill
+of sale over his commercial signature. Of course, several conveyances
+would leave the hide much scarred and hard to read; and, as there were
+"road brands" also used to protect the property while in transit from
+the South to the North or from the range to the market, the reading of
+the brands and the determination of ownership of the animal might be,
+and very often was, a nice matter, and one not always settled without
+argument; and argument in the West often meant bloodshed in those days.
+Some hard men started up in trade near the old cattle trails, and made a
+business of disputing brands with the trail drivers. Sometimes they
+made good their claims, and sometimes they did not. There were graves
+almost in line from Texas to Montana.
+
+It is now perfectly easy to see what a wide and fertile field was here
+offered to men who did not want to observe the law. Here was property to
+be had without work, and property whose title could easily be called
+into question; whose ownership was a matter of testimony and record, to
+be sure, but testimony which could be erased or altered by the same
+means which once constituted it a record and sign. The brand was made
+with an iron, and it could be changed with an iron. A large and
+profitable industry arose in changing these brands. The rustler,
+brand-burner or brand-blotcher now became one of the new Western
+characters, and a new sort of bad-manism had its birth.
+
+"It is very easy to see how temptation was offered to the cow thief and
+'brand blotter.' Here were all these wild cattle running loose over the
+country. The imprint of a hot iron on a hide made the creature the
+property of the brander, provided no one else had branded it before. The
+time of priority was matter of proof. With the handy "running-iron" or
+straight rod, which was always attached to his saddle when he rode out,
+could not the cow thief erase a former brand and put over it one of his
+own? Could he not, for instance, change a U into an O, or a V into a
+diamond, or a half-circle into a circle? Could he not, moreover, kill
+and skin an animal and sell the beef as his own? Between him and the
+owner was only this little mark. Between him and changing this mark was
+nothing but his moral principles. The range was very wide. Hardly a
+figure would show on that unwinking horizon all day long. And what was a
+heifer here and there?"
+
+Such was the temptation and opportunity which led many a man to step
+over the line between right and wrong. Their excuse lies in the fact
+that the line was newly drawn and that it was often vague and inexact.
+It was easy, from killing or rebranding an occasional cow, to see the
+profits of larger operation. The faithful cowboys who cared for these
+herds and protected them even with their lives in the interest of absent
+owners began in time to tire of working on a salary, and settled down
+into little ranches of their own, starting with a herd of cattle
+lawfully purchased and branded. An occasional maverick came across their
+range and they branded it. A brand was faint and not legible, and they
+put their own iron over it. They learned that pyrography with a hot
+poker was very profitable. The rest was easy. The first step was the one
+that counted; but who could tell where that first step was taken?
+
+At any rate, cattle owners began to take notice of their cows as the
+prices went up, and they had laws made to protect property rapidly
+enhancing in value. Cow owners were required to have fixed or
+stencil-irons, and were forbidden to trace a pattern with a straight
+iron or "running-iron." Each ranch must have its own iron or stencil.
+Texas as early as the '60's and '70's passed laws forbidding the use of
+the running-iron altogether, so that after that it was not safe to be
+caught riding the range with a straight iron under the saddle flap. Any
+man so discovered had to do some quick explaining.
+
+The next step after this was the organization of the cattle associations
+in the several territories and states which made the home of the cattle
+trade. These associations banded together in a national association.
+Detectives were placed at the stockyards in Chicago and Kansas City,
+charged with the finding of cattle stolen on the range and shipped with
+or without clean brands. In short, there had now grown up an armed and
+legal warfare between the cow men themselves--in the first place very
+large-handed thieves--and the rustlers and "little fellows" who were
+accused of being too liberal with their brand blotching. The prosecution
+of these men was undertaken with something of the old vigor that
+characterized the pursuit of horse thieves, with this difference, that,
+whereas all the world had hated a horse thief as a common enemy, very
+much of the world found excuse for the so-called rustler, who was known
+to be doing only what his accusers had done before him.
+
+There may be a certain interest attaching to the methods of the range
+riders of this day, and those who care to go into the history of the
+cattle trade in its early days are referred to the work earlier quoted,
+where the matter is more fully covered.[F] Brief reference will suffice
+here.
+
+[Footnote F: "The Story of the Cowboy." By E. Hough. D. Appleton & Co.]
+
+The rustler might brand with his own straight running-iron, as it were,
+writing over again the brand he wished to change; but this was clumsy
+and apt to be detected, for the new wound would slough and look
+suspicious. A piece of red-hot hay wire or telegraph wire was a better
+tool, for this could be twisted into the shape of almost any registered
+brand, and it would so cunningly connect the edges of both that the
+whole mark would seem to be one scar of the same date. The fresh burn
+fitted in with the older one so that it was impossible to swear that it
+was not a part of the first brand mark. Yet another way of softening a
+fresh and fraudulent brand was to brand through a wet blanket with a
+heavy iron, which thus left a wound deep enough, but not apt to slough,
+and so betray a brand done long after the round-up, and hence subject to
+scrutiny.
+
+As to the ways in which brands were altered in their lines, these were
+many and most ingenious. A sample page will be sufficient to show the
+possibilities of the art by which the rustler set over to his own herds
+on the free range the cows of his far-away neighbor, whom, perhaps, he
+did not love as himself. The list on the opposite page is taken from
+"The Story of the Cowboy."
+
+Such, then, was the burglar of the range, the rustler, to whom most of
+the mysterious and untraceable crimes were ascribed. Such also were
+the excuses to be offered for some of the men who did what to them did
+not seem wrong acts. The sudden hostility of the newly-come cow men
+embittered and inflamed them, and from this it was easy and natural to
+the arbitrament of arms.
+
+[Illustration: HOW THE RUSTLER WORKED
+The above plate illustrates the manner in which cow-brands were changed.
+The original brand appears in each case to the left, and the various
+alterations follow. It will be noted that with every change there is
+something added--the rule always adopted by the swindler]
+
+The bad man of the plains dates to this era, and his acts may be
+attributed to these causes. There were to be found among these men many
+refugees and outlaws, as well as many better men gone wrong through
+point of view. Fierce and far were the battles between the rustlers and
+the cow barons. Commerce had its way at last. The lawless man had to go,
+and he had to go even before the law had come.
+
+The Vigilantes of the cattle range, organizing first in Montana and
+working southward, made a clean sweep in their work. In one campaign
+they killed somewhere between sixty and eighty men accused of cattle
+rustling. They hung thirteen men on one railroad bridge one morning in
+northwestern Nebraska. The statement is believed to be correct that, in
+the ten years from 1876 to 1886, they executed more men without process
+of law than have been executed under the law in all the United States
+since then. These lynchings also were against the law. In short, it may
+perhaps begin to appear to those who study into the history of our
+earlier civilization that the term "law" is a very wide and lax and
+relative one, and one extremely difficult of exact application.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XII
+
+Wild Bill Hickok--_The Beau Ideal of the Western Bad Man; Chivalric,
+Daring, Generous, and Game_--_A Type of the Early Western Frontier
+Officer_.
+
+
+As has been shown in preceding chapters, the Western plains were passed
+over and left unsettled until the advent of the railroads, which began
+to cross the plains coincident with the arrival of the great cattle
+herds which came up from the South after a market. This market did not
+wait for the completion of the railroads, but met the railroads more
+than half way; indeed, followed them quite across the plains. The
+frontier sheriff now came upon the Western stage as he had never done
+before. The bad man also sprang into sudden popular recognition, the
+more so because he was now accessible to view and within reach of the
+tourist and tenderfoot investigator of the Western fauna. These were
+palmy days for the wild West.
+
+Unless it be a placer camp in the mountains, there is no harder
+collection of human beings to be found than that which gathers in tents
+and shanties at a temporary railway terminus of the frontier. Yet such
+were all the capitals of civilization in the earliest days. One town was
+like another. The history of Wichita and Newton and Fort Dodge was the
+history of Abilene and Ellsworth and Hays City and all the towns at the
+head of the advancing rails. The bad men and women of one moved on to
+the next, just as they did in the stampedes of placer days.
+
+To recount the history of one after another of these wild towns would be
+endless and perhaps wearisome. But this history has one peculiar feature
+not yet noted in our investigations. All these cow camps meant to be
+real towns some day. They meant to take the social compact. There came
+to each of these camps men bent upon making homes, and these men began
+to establish a law and order spirit and to set up a government. Indeed,
+the regular system of American government was there as soon as the
+railroad was there, and this law was strong on its legislative and
+executive sides. The frontier sheriff or town marshal was there, the man
+for the place, as bold and hardy as the bold and hardy men he was to
+meet and subdue, as skilled with weapons, as willing to die; and upheld,
+moreover, with that sense of duty and of moral courage which is granted
+even to the most courageous of men when he feels that he has the
+sentiment of the majority of good people at his back.
+
+To describe the life of one Western town marshal, himself the best and
+most picturesque of them all, is to cover all this field sufficiently.
+There is but one man who can thus be chosen, and that is Wild Bill
+Hickok, better known for a generation as "Wild Bill," and properly
+accorded an honorable place in American history.
+
+The real name of Wild Bill was James Butler Hickok, and he was born in
+May, 1837, in La Salle county, Illinois. This brought his youth into the
+days of Western exploration and conquest, and the boy read of Carson and
+Fremont, then popular idols, with the result that he proposed a life of
+adventure for himself. He was eighteen years of age when he first saw
+the West as a fighting man under Jim Lane, of Free Soil fame, in the
+guerrilla days of Kansas before the civil war. He made his mark, and
+was elected a constable in that dangerous country before he was twenty
+years of age. He was then a tall, "gangling" youth, six feet one in
+height, with yellow hair and blue eyes. He later developed into as
+splendid looking a man as ever trod on leather, muscular and agile as he
+was powerful and enduring. His features were clean-cut and expressive,
+his carriage erect and dignified, and no one ever looked less the
+conventional part of the bad man assigned in popular imagination. He was
+not a quarrelsome man, although a dangerous one, and his voice was low
+and even, showing a nervous system like that of Daniel Boone--"not
+agitated." It might have been supposed that he would be a natural master
+of weapons, and such was the case. The use of rifle and revolver was
+born in him, and perhaps no man of the frontier ever surpassed him in
+quick and accurate use of the heavy six-shooter. The religion of the
+frontier was not to miss, and rarely ever did he shoot except he knew
+that he would not miss. The tale of his killings in single combat is the
+longest authentically assigned to any man in American history.
+
+After many experiences with the pro-slavery folk from the border, Bill,
+or "Shanghai Bill," as he was then known--a nickname which clung for
+years--went stage driving for the Overland, and incidentally did some
+effective Indian fighting for his employers, finally, in the year 1861,
+settling down as station agent for the Overland at Rock Creek station,
+about fifty miles west of Topeka. He was really there as guard for the
+horse band, for all that region was full of horse thieves and
+cutthroats, and robberies and killings were common enough. It was here
+that there occurred his greatest fight, the greatest fight of one man
+against odds at close range that is mentioned in any history of any part
+of the world. There was never a battle like it known, nor is the West
+apt again to produce one matching it.
+
+The borderland of Kansas was at that time, as may be remembered, ground
+debated by the anti-slavery and pro-slavery factions, who still waged
+bitter war against one another, killing, burning, and pillaging without
+mercy. The civil war was then raging, and Confederates from Missouri
+were frequent visitors in eastern Kansas under one pretext or another,
+of which horse lifting was the one most common, it being held legitimate
+to prey upon the enemy as opportunity offered. Two border outlaws by
+the name of the McCandlas boys led a gang of hard men in enterprises of
+this nature, and these intended to run off the stage company's horses
+when they found they could not seduce Bill to join their number. He told
+them to come and take the horses if they could; and on the afternoon of
+December 16, 1861, ten of them, led by the McCandlas brothers, rode up
+to his dugout to do so. Bill was alone, his stableman being away
+hunting. He retreated to the dark interior of his dugout and got ready
+his weapons, a rifle, two six-shooters, and a knife.
+
+The assailants proceeded to batter in the door with a log, and as it
+fell in, Jim McCandlas, who must have been a brave man to undertake so
+foolhardy a thing against a man already known as a killer, sprang in at
+the opening. He, of course, was killed at once. This exhausted the
+rifle, and Bill picked up the six-shooters from the table and in three
+quick shots killed three more of the gang as they rushed in at the door.
+Four men were dead in less than that many seconds; but there were still
+six others left, all inside the dugout now, and all firing at him at a
+range of three feet. It was almost a miracle that, under such
+surroundings, the man was not killed. Bill now was crowded too much
+to use his firearms, and took to the bowie, thrusting at one man and
+another as best he might. It is known among knife-fighters that a man
+will stand up under a lot of flesh-cutting and blood-letting until the
+blade strikes a bone. Then he seems to drop quickly if it be a deep and
+severe thrust. In this chance medley, the knife wounds inflicted on each
+other by Bill and his swarming foes did not at first drop their men; so
+that it must have been several minutes that all seven of them were mixed
+in a mass of shooting, thrusting, panting, and gasping humanity. Then
+Jack McCandlas swung his rifle barrel and struck Bill over the head,
+springing upon him with his knife as well. Bill got his hand on a
+six-shooter and killed him just as he would have struck. After that no
+one knows what happened, not even Bill himself, who got his name then
+and there. "I just got sort of wild," he said, describing it. "I thought
+my heart was on fire. I went out to the pump then to get a drink, and I
+was all cut and shot to pieces."
+
+[Illustration: From a painting by John W. Norton
+WILD BILL HICKOK'S DESPERATE FIGHT IN THE DUGOUT--ONE MAN AGAINST TEN]
+
+They called him Wild Bill after that, and he had earned the name. There
+were six dead men on the floor of the dugout. He had fairly whipped the
+ten of them, and the four remaining had enough and fled from that awful
+hole in the ground. Two of these were badly wounded. Bill followed them
+to the door. His own weapons were exhausted or not at hand by this time,
+but his stableman came up just then with a rifle in his hands. Bill
+caught it from him, and, cut up as he was, fired and killed one of the
+wounded desperadoes as he tried to mount his horse. The other wounded
+man later died of his wounds. Eight men were killed by the one. The two
+who got to their horses and escaped were perhaps never in the dugout at
+all, for it was hardly large enough to hold another man had any wanted
+to get in.
+
+There is no record of any fighting man to equal this. It took Bill a
+year to recover from his wounds. The life of the open air and hard work
+brought many Western men through injuries which would be fatal in the
+States. The pure air of the plains had much to do with this. Bill now
+took service as wagon-master under General Fremont and managed to get
+attacked by a force of Confederates while on his way to Sedalia, the war
+being now in full swing. He fled and was pursued; but, shooting back
+with six-shooters, killed four men. It will be seen that he had now in
+single fight killed twelve men, and he was very young. This tally did
+not cover Indians, of whom he had slain several. Although he did not
+enlist, he went into the army as an independent sharpshooter, just
+because the fighting was good, and his work at this was very deadly. In
+four hours at the Pea Ridge battle, where he lay behind a log, on a hill
+commanding the flat where the Confederates were formed, he is said to
+have killed thirty-five men, one of them the Confederate General
+McCullough. It was like shooting buffalo for him. He was charged by a
+company of the enemy, but was rescued by his own men.
+
+Not yet enlisting, Bill went in as a spy for General Curtis, and took
+the dangerous work of going into "Pap" Price's lines, among the
+touch-and-go Missourians and Arkansans, in search of information useful
+to the Union forces. Bill enlisted for business purposes in a company of
+Price's mounted rangers, got the knowledge desired, and fled, killing a
+Confederate sergeant by name of Lawson in his escape. Curtis sent him
+back again, this time into the forces of Kirby Smith, then in Texas, but
+reported soon to move up into Arkansas. Bill enlisted again, and again
+showed his skill in the saddle, killing two men as he fled. Count up all
+his known victims to this time, and the tally would be at least
+sixty-two men; and Bill was then but twenty-five.
+
+A third time Curtis sent Bill back into the Confederate lines, this time
+into another part of Price's army. Here he was detected and arrested as
+a spy. Bound hand and foot in his death watch, he killed his captor
+after he had torn his hands free, and once more escaped. After that, he
+dared not go back again, for he was too well known and too difficult to
+disguise. He could not keep out of the fighting, however, and went as a
+scout and free lance with General Davis, during Price's second invasion
+of Missouri. He was not an enlisted man, and seems to have done pretty
+much as he liked. One day he rode out on his own hook, and was stopped
+by three men, who ordered him to halt and dismount. All three men had
+their hands on their revolvers; but, to show the difference between
+average men and a specialist, Bill killed two of them and fatally shot
+the other before they could get into action. His tally was now sixty-six
+men at least.
+
+Curtis now sent Bill out into Kansas to look into a report that some
+Indians were about to join the Confederate forces. Bill got the news,
+and also engaged in a knife duel with the Sioux, Conquering Bear, whom
+he accused of trying to ambush him. It was a fair and desperate fight,
+with knives, and although Bill finally killed his man, he himself was so
+badly cut up that he came near dying, his arm being ripped from shoulder
+to elbow, a wound which it took years to mend. It is doubtful if any man
+ever survived such injuries as he did, for by this time he was a mass of
+scars from pistol and knife wounds. He had probably been in danger of
+his life more than a hundred times in personal difficulties; for the man
+with a reputation as a bad man has a reputation which needs continual
+defending.
+
+After the war, Bill lived from hand to mouth, like most frontier
+dwellers. It was at Springfield, Missouri, that another duel of his long
+list occurred, in which he killed Dave Tutt, a fine pistol shot and a
+man with social ambitions in badness. It was a fair fight in the town
+square by appointment. Bill killed his man and wheeled so quickly on
+Tutt's followers that Tutt had not had time to fall before Bill's
+six-shooter was turned the opposite way, and he was asking Tutt's
+friends if they wanted any of it themselves. They did not. This fight
+was forced on Bill, and his quiet attempts to avoid it and his stern way
+of accepting it, when inevitable, won him high estimation on the border.
+Indeed, he was now known all over the country, and his like has not
+since been seen. He was still a splendid looking man, and as cool and
+quiet and modest as ever he had been.
+
+Bill now went to trapping in the less settled parts of Nebraska, and for
+a while he lived in peace, until he fell into a saloon row over some
+trivial matter and invited four of his opponents outside to fight him
+with pistols; the four were to fire at the word, and Bill to do the
+same--his pistol against their four. In this fight he killed one man at
+first fire, but he himself was shot through the shoulder and disabled in
+his right arm. He killed two more with his left hand and badly wounded
+the other. This was a fair fight also, and the only wonder is he was not
+killed; but he seemed never to consider odds, and literally he knew
+nothing but fight.
+
+His score was now seventy-two men, not counting Indians. He himself
+never reported how many Indians he and Buffalo Bill killed as scouts in
+the Black Kettle campaign under Carr and Primrose, but the killing of
+Black Kettle himself was sometimes attributed to Wild Bill. The latter
+was badly wounded in the thigh with a lance, and it took a long time for
+this wound to heal. To give this hurt and others better opportunity for
+mending, Bill now took a trip back East to his home in Illinois. While
+East he found that he had a reputation, and he undertook to use it. He
+found no way of making a living, however, and he returned to the West,
+where he could better market his qualifications.
+
+At that time Hays City, Kansas, was one of the hardest towns on the
+frontier. It had more than a hundred gambling dives and saloons to its
+two thousand population, and murder was an ordinary thing. Hays needed a
+town marshal, and one who could shoot. Wild Bill was unanimously
+selected, and in six weeks he was obliged to kill Jack Strawhan for
+trying to shoot him. This he did by reason of his superior quickness
+with the six-shooter, for Strawhan was drawing first. Another bad man,
+Mulvey, started to run Hays, in whose peace and dignity Bill now felt a
+personal ownership. Covered by Mulvey's two revolvers, Bill found room
+for the lightning flash of time, which is all that is needed by the
+real revolver genius, and killed Mulvey on the spot. His tally was now
+seventy-five men. He made it seventy-eight in a fight with a bunch of
+private soldiers, who called him a "long-hair"--a term very accurate, by
+the way, for Bill was proud of his long, blond hair, as was General
+Custer and many another man of the West at that time. In this fight,
+Bill was struck by seven pistol balls and barely escaped alive by flight
+to a ranch on the prairie near by. He lay there three weeks, while
+General Phil Sheridan had details out with orders to get him dead or
+alive. He later escaped in a box-car to another town, and his days as
+marshal of Hays were over.
+
+Bill now tried his hand at Wild West theatricals, seeing that already
+many Easterners were "daffy," as he called it, about the West; but he
+failed at this, and went back once more to the plains where he belonged.
+He was chosen marshal of Abilene, then the cow camp par excellence of
+the middle plains, and as tough a community as Hays had been.
+
+The wild men from the lower plains, fighting men, mad from whiskey and
+contact with the settlements' possibilities of long-denied indulgence,
+swarmed in the streets and dives, mingling with desperadoes and toughs
+from all parts of the frontier. Those who have never lived in such a
+community will never be able by any description to understand its
+phenomena. It seems almost unbelievable that sober, steady-going America
+ever knew such days; but there they were, and not so long ago, for this
+was only 1870.
+
+Two days after Bill was elected marshal of Abilene, he killed a
+desperado who was "whooping-up" the town in customary fashion. That same
+night, he was on the street, in a dim light, when all at once he saw a
+man whisk around a corner, and saw something shine, as he thought, with
+the gleam of a weapon. As showing how quick were the hand and eye of the
+typical gun-man of the day, it may be stated that Bill killed this man
+in a flash, only to find later that it was a friend, and one of his own
+deputies. The man was only pulling a handkerchief from his pocket. Bill
+knew that he was watched every moment by men who wanted to kill him. He
+had his life in his hands all the time. For instance, he had next to
+kill the friend of the desperado whom he had shot. By this time, Abilene
+respected its new marshal; indeed, was rather proud of him. The reign
+of the bad man of the plains was at its height, and the professional
+man-killer, the specialist with firearms, was a figure here and there
+over wide regions. Among all these none compared with this unique
+specimen. He was generous, too, as he was deadly, for even yet he was
+supporting a McCandlas widow, and he always furnished funerals for his
+corpses. He had one more to furnish soon. Enemies down the range among
+the cow men made up a purse of five thousand dollars, and hired eight
+men to kill the town marshal and bring his heart back South. Bill heard
+of it, and literally made all of them jump off the railroad train where
+he met them. One was killed in the jump. His list of homicides was now
+eighty-one. He had never yet been arrested for murder, and his killing
+was in fair open fight, his life usually against large odds. He was a
+strange favorite of fortune, who seemed certainly to shield him
+round-about.
+
+Bill now went East for another try at theatricals, in which, happily, he
+was unsuccessful, and for which he felt a strong distaste. He was
+scared--on the stage; and when he saw what was expected of him he quit
+and went back once more to the West. He appeared at Cheyenne, in the
+Black Hills, wandering thus from one point to another after the fashion
+of the frontier, where a man did many things and in many places. He had
+a little brush with a band of Indians, and killed four of them with four
+shots from his six-shooter, bringing his list in red and white to
+eighty-five men. He got away alive from the Black Hills with difficulty;
+but in 1876 he was back again at Deadwood, married now, and, one would
+have thought, ready to settle down.
+
+But the life of turbulence ends in turbulence. He who lives by the sword
+dies by the sword. Deadwood was as bad a place as any that could be
+found in the mining regions, and Bill was not an officer here, as he had
+been in Kansas towns. As marshal of Hays and Abilene and United States
+marshal later at Hays City, he had been a national character. He was at
+Deadwood for the time only plain Wild Bill, handsome, quiet, but ready
+for anything.
+
+Ready for anything but treachery! He himself had always fought fair and
+in the open. His men were shot in front. Not such was to be his fate. On
+the day of August 2, 1876, while he was sitting at a game of cards in a
+saloon, a hard citizen by name of Jack McCall slipped up behind him,
+placed a pistol to the back of his head, and shot him dead before he
+knew he had an enemy near. The ball passed through Bill's head and out
+at the cheek, lodging in the arm of a man across the table.
+
+Bill had won a little money from McCall earlier in the day, and won it
+fairly, but the latter had a grudge, and was no doubt one of those
+disgruntled souls who "had it in" for all the rest of the world. He got
+away with the killing at the time, for a miners' court let him go. A few
+days later, he began to boast about his act, seeing what fame was his
+for ending so famous a life; but at Yankton they arrested him, tried him
+before a real court, convicted him, and hanged him promptly.
+
+Wild Bill's body was buried at Deadwood, and his grave, surrounded by a
+neat railing and marked by a monument, long remained one of the features
+of Deadwood. The monument and fence were disfigured by vandals who
+sought some memento of the greatest bad man ever in all likelihood seen
+upon the earth. His tally of eighty-five men seems large, but in fair
+probability it is not large enough. His main encounters are known
+historically. He killed a great many Indians at different times, but of
+these no accurate estimate can be claimed. Nor is his list of victims
+as a sharpshooter in the army legitimately to be added to his record.
+Cutting out all doubtful instances, however, there remains no doubt that
+he killed between twenty and thirty men in personal combat in the open,
+and that never once was he tried in any court on a charge even of
+manslaughter.
+
+This record is not approached by that of any other known bad man. Many
+of them are credited with twenty men, a dozen men, and so forth; but
+when the records are sifted the list dwindles. It is doubted whether any
+other bad man in America ever actually killed twenty men in fair
+personal combat. Bill was not killed in fair fight, nor could McCall
+have hurt him had Bill suspected his intent.
+
+Hickok was about thirty-nine years old when killed, and he had averaged
+a little more than two men for each year of his entire life. He was
+well-known among army officers, and esteemed as a scout and a man, never
+regarded as a tough in any sense. He was a man of singular personal
+beauty. Of him General Custer, soon thereafter to fall a victim himself
+upon the plains, said: "He was a plainsman in every sense of the word,
+yet unlike any other of his class. Whether on foot or on horseback, he
+was one of the most perfect types of physical manhood I ever saw. His
+manner was entirely free from all bluster and bravado. He never spoke of
+himself unless requested to do so. His influence among the frontiersmen
+was unbounded; his word was law. Wild Bill was anything but a
+quarrelsome man, yet none but himself could enumerate the many conflicts
+in which he had been engaged."
+
+These are the words of one fighting man about another, and both men are
+entitled to good rank in the annals of the West. The praise of an army
+general for a man of no rank or wealth leaves us feeling that, after
+all, it was a possible thing for a bad man to be a good man, and worthy
+of respect and admiration, utterly unmingled with maudlin sentiment or
+weak love for the melodramatic.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIII
+
+Frontier Wars--_Armed Conflicts of Bodies of Men on the
+Frontiers_--_Political Wars; Town Site Wars; Cattle Wars_--_Factional
+Fights_.
+
+
+The history of the border wars on the American frontier, where the
+fighting was more like battle than murder, and where the extent of the
+crimes against law became too large for the law ever to undertake any
+settlement, would make a long series of bloody volumes. These wars of
+the frontier were sometimes political, as the Kansas anti-slavery
+warfare; or, again, they were fights over town sites, one armed band
+against another, and both against the law. Wars over cows, as of the
+cattle men against the rustlers and "little fellows," often took on the
+phase of large armed bodies of men meeting in bloody encounter; though
+the bloodiest of these wars are those least known, and the _opera
+bouffe_ wars those most widely advertised.
+
+The state of Kansas, now so calm and peaceful, is difficult to picture
+as the scene of a general bloodshed; yet wherever you scratch Kansas
+history you find a fight. No territory of equal size has had so much war
+over so many different causes. Her story in Indian fighting, gambler
+fighting, outlaw fighting, town site fighting, and political fighting is
+one not approached by any other portion of the West; and if at times it
+was marked with fanaticism or with sordidness, it was none the less
+bitter and notable.
+
+The border wars of Kansas and Missouri at the time immediately preceding
+the civil war would be famed in song and story, had not the greater
+conflict between North and South wiped all that out of memory. Even the
+North was divided over the great question of the repeal of the Missouri
+Compromise. Alabama, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia,
+Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New
+Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and
+Virginia gave a whole or a majority vote for this repeal of the
+Compromise. Against the repeal were Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts,
+New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin.
+Illinois and New Jersey voted a tie vote. Ohio cast four votes for the
+repeal measure, seventeen against it.
+
+This vote brought the territories of Kansas and Nebraska into the Union
+with the option open on whether or not they should have slavery: "it
+being the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate slavery
+into any territory, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people
+thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their own domestic
+institutions in their own way."
+
+That was very well; but who were "the people" of these debated grounds?
+Hundreds of abolitionists of the North thought it their duty to flock to
+Kansas and take up arms. Hundreds of the inhabitants of Missouri thought
+it incumbent upon them to run across the line and vote in Kansas on the
+"domestic institutions"; and to shoot in Kansas and to burn and ravage
+in Kansas. They were met by the anti-slavery legions along the wide
+frontier, and brother slew brother for years, one series of more or less
+ignoble and dastardly outrages following another in big or little,
+murders and arson in big or little, until the whole country at last was
+drawn into this matter of the domestic institutions of "bleeding
+Kansas." The animosities formed in those days were bitter and enduring
+ones, and the more prominent figures on both sides were men marked for
+later slaughter. The civil war and the slavery question were fought out
+all over the West for ten years, even twenty years after the war was
+over. Some large figures came up out of this internecine strife, and
+there were many deeds of courage and many romantic adventures; but on
+the whole, although the result of all this was for the best, and added
+another state to the list unalterably opposed to human slavery, the
+story in detail is not a pleasant one, and adds no great glory to either
+side. It is a chapter of American history which is very well let alone.
+
+When the railroads came across the Western plains, they brought a man
+who has been present on the American frontier ever since the
+revolutionary war,--the land boomer. He was in Kentucky in time to rob
+poor old Daniel Boone of all the lands he thought he owned. He founded
+Marietta, on the Ohio river, on a land steal; and thence, westward, laid
+out one town after another. The early settler who came down the Ohio
+valley in the first and second decades of the past century passed the
+ruins of abandoned towns far back to the east even in that day. The
+town-site shark passed across the Mississippi river and the Missouri,
+and everywhere his record was the same. He was the pioneer of avarice in
+very many cases, and often he inaugurated strife where he purported to
+be establishing law. Each town thought itself the garden spot and center
+of the universe--one knows not how many Kansas towns, for instance,
+contended over the absurd honor of being exactly at the center of the
+United States!--and local pride was such that each citizen must unite
+with others even in arms, if need be, to uphold the merits of his own
+"city."
+
+This peculiar phase of frontier nature usually came most into evidence
+over the questions of county seats. Hardly a frontier county seat was
+ever established without a fight of some kind, and often a bloody one.
+It has chanced that the author has been in and around a few of these
+clashes between rival towns, and he may say that the vehemence of the
+antagonism of such encounters would have been humorous, had it not been
+so deadly. Two "cities," composed each of a few frame shanties and a set
+of blue-print maps, one just as barren of delight as the other, and
+neither worth fighting over at the time, do not seem typical of any
+great moral purpose; yet at times their citizens fought as stubbornly as
+did the men who fought for and against slavery in Kansas. One instance
+of this sort of thing will do, and it is covered in the chapter
+describing the Stevens County War, one of the most desperate and bloody,
+as well as one of the most recent feuds of local politicians.
+
+For some reason, perhaps that of remoteness of time, the wars of the cow
+men of the range seem to have had a bolder, a less sordid and more
+romantic interest, if these terms be allowable. When the cow man began
+to fence up the free range, to shut up God's out-of-doors, he intrenched
+upon more than a local or a political pride. He was now infringing upon
+the great principle of personal freedom. He was throttling the West
+itself, which had always been a land of freedom. One does not know
+whether all one's readers have known it, that unspeakable feeling of
+freedom, of independence, of rebellion at restraint, which came when one
+could ride or drive for days across the empire of the plains and never
+meet a fence to hinder, nor need a road to show the way. To meet one of
+these new far-flung fences of the rich men who began to take up the West
+was at that time only to cut it and ride on. The free men of the West
+would not be fenced in. The range was theirs, so they blindly and
+lovingly thought. Let those blame them who love this day more than that.
+
+But the fence was the sign of the property-owning man; and the
+property-owning man has always beaten the nomad and the restless man at
+last, and set metes and bounds for him to observe. The nesters and
+rustlers fought out the battle for the free range more fiercely than was
+ever generally known.
+
+One of the most widely known of these cow wars was the absurd Johnson
+County War, of Wyoming, which got much newspaper advertising at the
+time--the summer of 1892--and which was always referred to with a
+certain contempt among old-timers as the "dude war." Only two men were
+killed in this war, and the non-resident cattle men who undertook to be
+ultra-Western and do a little vigilante work for themselves among the
+rustlers found that they were not fit for the task. They were very glad
+indeed to get themselves arrested and under cover, more especially in
+the protection of the military. They found that they had not lost any
+rustlers when they stirred up a whole valley full and were themselves
+besieged, surrounded, and well-nigh ready for a general wiping out. They
+killed a couple of "little fellows," or, rather, some of their hired
+Texas cowboys did it for them, but that was all they accomplished,
+except well-nigh to bankrupt Wyoming in the legal muddle, out of which,
+of course, nothing came. There were in this party of cattle men a member
+of the legislature, a member of the stock commission, some two dozen
+wealthy cattle men, two Harvard graduates, and a young Englishman in
+search of adventure. They made, on the whole, about the most
+contemptible and inefficient band of vigilantes that ever went out to
+regulate things, although their deeds were reported by wire to many
+journals, and for a time perhaps they felt that they were cutting quite
+a figure. They had very large property losses to incite them to their
+action, for the rustlers were then pretty much running things in that
+part of Wyoming, and the local courts would not convict them. This
+fiasco scarcely hastened the advent of the day--which came soon enough
+after the railroads and the farmers--under which the home dweller
+outweighed the nomad.[G]
+
+[Footnote G: See "The Story of the Cowboy," by E. Hough. D. Appleton &
+Co.]
+
+Wars between sheep men and cattle men sometimes took on the phase of
+armed bodies of men meeting in bloody encounter. The sheep were always
+unwelcome on the range, and are so to-day, although the courts now
+adjust such matters better than they formerly did. The cow baron and his
+men often took revenge upon the woolly nuisances themselves and killed
+them in numbers. The author knows of one instance where five thousand
+sheep were killed in one box canon by irate cow men whose range had been
+invaded. The sheep eat the grass down to the point of killing it, and
+cattle will not feed on a country which sheep have crossed. Many wars of
+this kind have been known all the way from Montana to Mexico.
+
+Again, factional fights might arise over some trivial matter as an
+immediate cause, in a community or a region where numbers of men fairly
+equal were separated in self-interest. In a day when life was still wild
+and free, and when the law was still unknown, these differences of
+opinion sometimes led to bitter and bloody conflicts between factions.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIV
+
+The Lincoln County War--_The Bloodiest, Most Dramatic and Most Romantic
+of all the Border Wars_--_First Authentic Story Ever Printed of the
+Bitterest Feud of the Southwest_.
+
+
+The entire history of the American frontier is one of rebellion against
+the law, if, indeed, that may be called rebellion whose apostles have
+not yet recognized any authority of the law. The frontier antedated
+anarchy. It broke no social compact, for it had never made one. Its
+population asked no protection save that afforded under the stern
+suzerainty of the six-shooter. The anarchy of the frontier, if we may
+call it such, was sometimes little more than self-interest against
+self-interest. This was the true description of the border conflict now
+in question.
+
+The Lincoln County War, fully speaking, embraced three wars; the Pecos
+War of the early '70's, the Harold War of 1874, and the Lincoln County
+War proper, which may be said to have begun in 1874 and to have ended in
+1879. The actors in these different conflicts were all intermingled.
+There was no blood feud at the bottom of this fighting. It was the war
+of self-interest against self-interest, each side supported by numbers
+of fighting men.
+
+At that time Lincoln County, New Mexico, was about as large as the state
+of Pennsylvania. For judicial purposes it was annexed to Donna Ana
+County, and its territories included both the present counties of Eddy
+and Chaves, and part of what is now Donna Ana. It extended west
+practically as far the Rio Grande river, and embraced a tract of
+mountains and high tableland nearly two hundred miles square. Out of
+this mountain chain, to the east and southeast, ran two beautiful
+mountain streams, the Bonito and the Ruidoso, flowing into the Hondo,
+which continues on to the flat valley of the Pecos river--once the
+natural pathway of the Texas cattle herds bound north to Utah and the
+mountain territories, and hence the natural pathway also for many lawful
+or lawless citizens from Texas.
+
+At the close of the civil war, Texas was full of unbranded and unowned
+cattle. Out of the town of Paris, Texas, which was founded by his
+father, came one John Chisum--one of the most typical cow men that ever
+lived. Bold, fearless, shrewd, unscrupulous, genial, magnetic, he was
+the man of all others to occupy a kingdom which had heretofore had no
+ruler.
+
+John Chisum drove the first herds up the Pecos trail to the territorial
+market. He held at one time perhaps eighty thousand head of cattle under
+his brand of the "Long I" and "jinglebob." Moreover, he had powers of
+attorney from a great many cow men in Texas and lower New Mexico,
+authorizing him to take up any trail cattle which he found under their
+respective brands. He carried a tin cylinder, large as a water-spout,
+that contained, some said, more than a thousand of these powers of
+attorney. At least, it is certain he had papers enough to give him a
+wide authority. Chisum riders combed every north-bound herd. If they
+found the cattle of any of his "friends," they were cut out and turned
+on the Chisum range. There were many "little fellows," small cattlemen,
+nested here and there on the flanks of the Chisum herds. What more
+natural than that they should steal from him, in case they found a
+market of their own? That was much easier than raising cows of their
+own. Now, there was a market up this winding Bonito valley, at Lincoln
+and Fort Stanton. The soldiers of the latter post, and the Indians of
+the Mescalero reservation near by, needed supplies. There were others
+besides John Chisum who might need a beef contract now and then, and
+cattle to fill it.
+
+[Illustration: JOHN SIMPSON CHISUM
+A famous cattle king, died December 23, 1884]
+
+At the end of the civil war, there was in New Mexico, with what was
+known as the California Column, which joined the forces of New Mexican
+volunteers, an officer known as Major L. G. Murphy. After the war, a
+great many men settled near the points where they were mustered out in
+the South and West. It was thus with Major Murphy, who located as
+post-trader at the little frontier post known as Fort Stanton, which was
+founded by Captain Frank Stanton in 1854, in the Indian days. John
+Chisum located his Bosque Grande ranch about 1865, and Murphy came to
+Fort Stanton about 1866. In 1875, Chisum dropped down to his South
+Spring River ranch, and by that time Murphy had been thrown out of the
+post-tradership by Major Clendenning, commanding officer, who did not
+like his methods. He had dropped nine miles down the Bonito from Fort
+Stanton, with two young associates, under the firm name of Murphy, Riley
+& Dolan, sometimes spoken of as L. G. Murphy & Co.
+
+Murphy was a hard-drinking man, yet withal something of a student. He
+was intelligent, generous, bold and shrewd. He "staked" every little cow
+man in Lincoln county, including a great many who hung on the flanks of
+John Chisum's herds. These men in turn were in their ethics bound to
+support him and his methods. Murphy was king of the Bonito country.
+Chisum was king of the Pecos; not merchant but cow man, and caring for
+nothing which had not grass and water on it.
+
+Here, then, were two rival kings. Each at times had occasion for a beef
+contract. The result is obvious to anyone who knows the ways of the
+remoter West in earlier days. The times were ripe for trouble. Murphy
+bought stolen beef, and furnished bran instead of flour on his Indian
+contracts, as the government records show. His henchmen held the Chisum
+herds as their legitimate prey. Thus we now have our stage set and
+peopled for the grim drama of a bitter border war.
+
+The Pecos war was mostly an indiscriminate killing among cow men and
+cattle thieves, and it cost many lives, though it had no beginning and
+no end. The Texas men, hard riders and cheerful shooters for the most
+part, came pushing up the Pecos and into the Bonito canon. Among these,
+in 1874, were four brothers known as the Harold boys, Bill, Jack, Tom
+and Bob, who had come from Texas in 1872. Two of them located ranches on
+the Ruidoso, being "staked" therein by Major Murphy, king for that part
+of the countryside. The Harold boys once undertook to run the town of
+Lincoln, and a foolish justice ordered a constable to arrest them. One
+Gillam, an ex-sheriff, told the boys to put on their guns. On that night
+there were killed Gillam, Bill Harold, Dave Warner and Martinez, the
+Mexican constable. The dead body of Martinez was lying in the street the
+next morning with a deep cross cut on the forehead. From that time on
+for the next five years, it was no uncommon thing to see dead men lying
+in the streets of Lincoln. The Harold boys had sworn revenge.
+
+There was a little dance in an adobe one night at Lincoln, when Ben
+Harold and some Texas men from the Seven Rivers country rode up. They
+killed four men and one woman that night before they started back to
+Seven Rivers. From that time on, it was Texas against the law, such as
+the latter was. No resident places the number of the victims of the
+Harold war at less than forty or fifty, and it is believed that at least
+seventy-five would be more correct. These killings proved the weakness
+of the law, for none of the Harold gang was ever punished. As for the
+Lincoln County War proper, the magazine was now handsomely laid. Only
+the spark was needed. What would that naturally be? Either an actual law
+court, or else--a woman! In due time, both were forthcoming.
+
+The woman in the case still lives to-day in New Mexico, sometimes spoken
+of as the "Cattle Queen" of New Mexico. She bears now the name of Mrs.
+Susan E. Barber. Her maiden name was Susan E. Hummer, the name sometimes
+spelled Homer, and she was born in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Susan
+Hummer was a granddaughter of Anna Maria Spangler-Stauffer. The Spangler
+family is a noble one of Germany and very old. George Spangler was
+cup-bearer to Godfrey, Chancellor of Frederick Barbarossa, and was with
+the latter on the Crusade when Barbarossa was drowned in the Syrian
+river, Calycadmus, in 1190. The American seat of this old family was in
+York county, Pennsylvania, where the first Spanglers settled in 1731. It
+was from this tenacious and courageous ancestry that there sprang this
+figure of a border warfare in a region wild as Barbarossa's realm
+centuries ago.
+
+On August 23, 1873, in Atchison, Kansas, Susan Hummer was married to
+Alexander A. McSween, a young lawyer fresh from the Washington
+university law school of St. Louis. McSween was born in Charlottetown,
+Prince Edward Island, and was educated in the first place as a
+Presbyterian minister. He was a man of good appearance, of intelligence
+and address, and of rather more polish than the average man. He was an
+orator, a dreamer, and a visionary; a strange, complex character. He was
+not a fighting man, and belonged anywhere in the world rather than on
+the frontier of the bloody Southwest. His health was not good, and he
+resolved to journey to New Mexico. He and his young bride started
+overland, with a good team and conveyance, and reached the little
+_placita_ of Lincoln, in the Bonito canon, March 15, 1875. Outside of
+the firm of Murphy, Riley & Dolan, there were at that time but one or
+two other American families. McSween started up in the practice of law.
+
+There appeared in northern New Mexico at about this time an Englishman
+by the name of J. H. Tunstall, newly arrived in the West in search of
+investment. Tunstall was told that there was good open cattle range to
+be had in Lincoln county. He came to Lincoln, met McSween, formed a
+partnership with him in the banking and mercantile business, and,
+moreover, started for himself, and altogether independently, a horse and
+cattle ranch on the Rio Feliz, a day's journey below Lincoln. Now, King
+Murphy, of Lincoln county, found a rival business growing up directly
+under his eyes. He liked this no better than King Chisum liked the
+little cow men on his flanks in the Seven Rivers country. Things were
+ripening still more rapidly for trouble. Presently, the immediate cause
+made its appearance.
+
+There had been a former partner and friend of Major Murphy in the
+post-tradership at Fort Stanton, Colonel Emil Fritz, who established the
+Fritz ranch, a few miles below Lincoln. Colonel Fritz having amassed a
+considerable fortune, concluded to return to Germany. He had insured his
+life in the American Insurance Company for ten thousand dollars, and
+had made a will leaving this policy, or the greater part of it, to his
+sister. The latter had married a clerk at Fort Stanton by the name of
+Scholland, but did not get along well with her husband. Heretofore no
+such thing as divorce had been known in that part of the world; but
+courts and lawyers were now present, and it occurred to Mrs. Scholland
+to have a divorce. She sent to Mr. McSween for legal counsel, and for a
+time lived in the McSween house.
+
+Now came news of the death, in Germany, of Colonel Emil Fritz. His
+brother, Charlie Fritz, undertook to look up the estate. He found the
+will and insurance policy had been left with Major Murphy; but Major
+Murphy, accustomed to running affairs in his own way, refused to give up
+the Emil Fritz will, and forced McSween to get a court order appointing
+Mrs. Scholland administratrix of the Fritz estate. Not even in that
+capacity would Major Murphy deliver to her the will and insurance policy
+when they were demanded, and it is claimed that he destroyed the will.
+Certainly it was never probated. Murphy was accustomed to keep this will
+in a tin can, hid in a hole in the adobe wall of his store building.
+There were no safes at that time and place. The policy had been left as
+security for a loan of nine hundred dollars advanced by a firm known as
+Spiegelberg Brothers. Few ingredients were now lacking for a typical
+melodrama. Meantime the plot thickened by the failure of the insurance
+company!
+
+McSween, in the interest of Mrs. Scholland, now went East to see what
+could be done in the collection of the insurance policy. He was able
+finally, in 1876, to collect the full amount of ten thousand dollars,
+and this he deposited in his own name in a St. Louis bank then owned by
+Colonel Hunter. He had been obliged to pay the Spiegelbergs the face of
+their loan before he could get the policy to take East with him. He
+wished to be secured against this advancement and reimbursed as well for
+his expenses, which, together with his fee, amounted to a considerable
+sum. Moreover, the German Minister enjoined McSween from turning over
+any of this money, as there were other heirs in Germany. Major Murphy
+owed McSween some money. Colonel Fritz also died owing McSween
+thirty-three hundred dollars, fees due on legal work. Yet Murphy
+demanded the full amount of the insurance policy from McSween again and
+again. Murphy, Riley & Dolan now sued out an attachment on McSween's
+property, and levied on the goods in the Tunstall-McSween store. The
+"law" was now doing its work; but there was a very liberal
+interpretation put upon the law's intent. As construed by Sheriff
+William Brady, the writ applied also to the Englishman Tunstall's
+property in cattle and horses on the Rio Feliz ranch; which, of course,
+was high-handed illegality. McSween's statement that he had no interest
+in the Feliz ranch served no purpose. Brady and Murphy were warm
+friends. The lawyer McSween had accused them of being something more
+than that--allies and conspirators. McSween and Tunstall bought Lincoln
+county scrip cheap; but when they presented it to the county treasurer,
+Murphy, it was not paid, and it was charged that he and Brady had made
+away with the county funds. That was never proved, for, as a matter of
+fact, no county books were ever kept! McSween started the first set ever
+known there.
+
+At this time there was working for Tunstall on the Feliz ranch the noted
+desperado, Billy the Kid, who a short time formerly had worked for John
+Chisum. The latter at this stage of the advancing troubles, appears
+rather as a third party, or as holding one point of a triangle, whose
+other two corners were occupied by the Murphy and McSween factions.
+
+Whether or not it was a legal posse which went out to serve the
+attachment on the Tunstall cattle--or whether or not a posse was
+necessary for that purpose--the truth is that a band of men, on February
+13th, 1878, did go out under some semblance of the law and in the
+interests of the Murphy people's claim. Some state that William S.
+Morton, or "Billy" Morton, was chosen by Sheriff Brady as his deputy and
+as leader of this posse. Others name different men as leaders.
+Certainly, the band was suited for any desperate occasion. With it was
+one Tom Hill, who had killed several men at different times, and who had
+been heard to say that he intended to kill Tunstall. There was also
+Jesse Evans, just in from the Rio Grande country, and, unless that were
+Billy the Kid, the most redoubtable fighter in all that country. Evans
+had formerly worked for John Chisum, and had been the friend of Billy
+the Kid; but these two had now become enemies. Others of the party were
+William M. Johnson, Ham Mills, Johnnie Hurley, Frank Baker, several
+ranchers still living in that country, and two or three Mexicans. All
+these rode across the mountains to the Ruidoso valley on their way to
+the Rio Feliz. They met, coming from the Tunstall ranch, Tunstall
+himself in company with his foreman, Dick Brewer, John Middleton and
+Billy the Kid. When the Murphy posse came up with Tunstall, he was
+alone. His men were at the time chasing a flock of wild turkeys along a
+distant hillside. When called upon to halt, Tunstall did so, and then
+came up toward the posse. "You wouldn't hurt me, boys, would you?" he
+said, as he approached leading his horse. When within a few yards, Tom
+Hill said to him, "Why, hello, Tunstall, is that you?" and almost with
+the words fired upon him with his six-shooter and shot him down. Some
+say that Hill shot Tunstall again, and a young Mexican boy called
+Pantilon beat in his skull with a rock. They put Tunstall's hat under
+his head and left him lying there beside his horse, which was also
+killed. His folded coat was found under the horse's head. His body,
+lashed on a burro's back, was brought over the mountains by his friends
+that night into Lincoln, twenty miles distant. Fifty men took up the
+McSween fight that night; for, in truth, the killing of Tunstall was
+murder and without justification.
+
+That was the beginning of the actual Lincoln County War. Dick Brewer,
+Tunstall's foreman, was now leader of the McSween fighting men. McSween,
+of course, supplied him with color of "legal" authority. He was
+appointed "special constable." Neither party had difficulty in obtaining
+all the legal papers required. Each party was presently to have a
+sheriff of its own. Meantime, there was at Lincoln an accommodating
+justice of the peace, John P. Wilson, who was ready to give either
+faction any sort of legal paper it demanded. Dick Brewer, Billy the Kid,
+and nearly a dozen others of the first McSween posse started to the
+lower country, where lived a good many of Murphy's friends, small cow
+men and others. On the Rio Penasco, about six miles from the Pecos, they
+came across a party of five men, two of whom, Billy Morton and Frank
+Baker, had been present at the killing of Tunstall. Baker and Morton
+surrendered under promise of safekeeping, and were held for a time at
+Roswell. On the trail from Roswell to Lincoln, at a point near the Agua
+Negra, both these men, while kneeling and pleading for their lives, were
+deliberately shot and killed by Billy the Kid. There was with the
+Brewer posse a buffalo-hunter by the name of McClosky, who had promised
+to take care of these prisoners. Joe McNab, of the posse, shot and
+killed McClosky in cold blood. In this McSween posse were "Doc"
+Skurlock, Charlie Bowdre, Billy the Kid, Hendry Brown, Jim French, John
+Middleton, with McNab, Wait and Smith, besides McClosky, who seems not
+to have been loyal enough to them to sanction cold blooded murder. These
+victims were killed March 7th, 1878.
+
+There had now been deliberate murder committed upon the one side and
+upon the other. There were many men implicated on each side. These men,
+in self-interest, now drew apart together. The factions, of necessity,
+became more firmly established. It may be seen that there was very
+little principle at stake on either side. The country was now simply
+going wild again. It meant to take the law into its own hands; and the
+population was divided into these two factions, to one or the other of
+which every resident must perforce belong. A choice, and sometimes a
+quick one, was an imperative necessity.
+
+The next killing was that of Buckshot Roberts, at Blazer's Mill, near
+the Mescalero Reservation buildings, an affair described in a later
+chapter. Thirteen men, later of the Kid's gang, led by Dick Brewer,
+attacked Roberts, who killed Dick Brewer before he himself died. The
+death of the latter left the Kid chief of the McSween forces.
+
+A great blood lust now possessed all the population. It wanted no law.
+There is no doubt about the intention to make away with Judge Warren
+Bristol of the circuit court. The latter, knowing of these turbulent
+times in Lincoln, decided not to hold court. He sent word to Sheriff
+William Brady to open court and then at once to adjourn it. This was on
+April 1, 1878.
+
+Sheriff Brady, in walking down the street toward the dwelling-house in
+which court sessions were then held, was obliged to pass the McSween
+store and residence. Behind the corral wall, there lay ambushed Billy
+the Kid and at least five others of his gang. Brady was accompanied by
+Billy Matthews (J. B. Matthews, now dead; postmaster of Roswell, New
+Mexico, in 1904), by George Hindman, his deputy, and Dad Peppin, later
+sheriff of Lincoln county. The Kid and his men waited until the victims
+had gone by. Then a volley was fired. Sheriff Brady, shot in the back,
+slowly sank down, his knees weakening under him. "My God! My God! My
+God!" he exclaimed, as he gradually dropped. He had been struck in the
+back by five balls. As he sank down, he turned his head to see his
+murderers, and as he did so received a ball in the eye, and so fell
+dead. George Hindman, the deputy, also shot in the back, ran down the
+street about one hundred and fifty yards before he fell. He lay in the
+street and few dared to go out to him. A saloon-keeper, Ike Stockton
+(himself a bad man, and later killed at Durango, Colorado), offered him
+a drink of water, which he brought in his hat, and Hindman, accepting
+it, fell back dead.
+
+The murder of Sheriff Brady left the country without even the semblance
+of law; but each party now took steps to set up a legal machinery of its
+own, as cover for its own acts. The old justice of the peace, John P.
+Wilson, would issue a warrant on any pretext for any person; but there
+must be some one with authority to serve the process. In a
+quasi-election, the McSween faction instituted John Copeland as their
+sheriff. The Murphy faction held that Copeland never qualified as
+sheriff. He lived with McSween part of the time. It was understood that
+he was sheriff for the purpose of bothering nobody but the Murphy
+people.
+
+Meantime, the other party were not thus to be surpassed. In June, 1878,
+Governor Axtell appointed George W. Peppin as sheriff of Lincoln county.
+Peppin qualified at Mesilla, came back to Lincoln, and demanded of
+Copeland the warrants in his possession. He had, on his part, twelve
+warrants for the arrest of members of the McSween gang. Little lacked
+now to add confusion in this bloody coil. The country was split into two
+factions. Each had a sheriff as a figurehead! What and where was the
+law?
+
+Peppin had to get fighting men to serve his warrants, and he could not
+always be particular about the social standing of his posses. He had a
+thankless and dangerous position as the "Murphy sheriff." Most of his
+posses were recruited from among the small ranchers and cow boys of the
+lower Pecos. Peppin was sheriff only a few months, and threw up the job
+$2,800 in debt.
+
+The men of both parties were now scouting about for each other here and
+there over a district more than a hundred miles square; but presently
+the war was to take on the dignity of a pitched battle. Early in July,
+1878, the Kid and his gang rounded up at the McSween house. There were a
+dozen white desperadoes in their party. There were about forty Mexicans
+also identified with the McSween faction. These were quartered in the
+Montana and Ellis residences, well down the street.
+
+The Murphy forces now surrounded the McSween house, and at once a
+pitched battle began. The McSween men started the firing from the
+windows and loopholes of their fortress. The Peppin men replied. The
+town, divided against itself, held under cover. For three days the two
+little armies lay here, separated by the distance of the street, perhaps
+sixty men in all on the McSween side, perhaps thirty or forty in all on
+the Murphy-Peppin side, of whom nineteen were Americans.
+
+To keep the McSween men inside their fortifications, Peppin had three
+men posted on the mountain side, whence they could look down directly
+upon the top of the houses, as the mountain here rises up sharply back
+of the narrow line of adobe buildings. These pickets were Charlie
+Crawford, Lucillo Montoye, and another Mexican, and with their
+long-range buffalo guns they threw a good many heavy slugs of lead into
+the McSween house. At last, one Fernando Herrera, a McSween Mexican,
+standing in the back door of the Montana house, fired, at a distance of
+about nine hundred yards, at Charlie Crawford. The shot cut Crawford
+down, and he lay, with his back broken, behind a rock on the mountain
+side in the hot sun nearly all day. Crawford was later brought down to
+the street. Medical attendance there was none, and few dared to offer
+sympathy, but Captain Saturnino Baca[H] carried Crawford a drink of
+water.
+
+[Footnote H: Captain Saturnino Baca was a friend of Kit Carson, an
+officer in the New Mexican Volunteers, and the second commanding officer
+of Fort Stanton. He came to Lincoln in 1865, and purchased of J.
+Trujillo the old stone tower, as part of what was then the Baca
+property, near the McSween residence. The Bacas were recognized as
+non-combatants, but were friendly to Major Murphy. Mrs. McSween and Mrs.
+Baca were bitter enemies, and it was commonly said that, as each side
+had a sheriff, each side had a woman. Bonifacio J. Baca, son of Captain
+and Mrs. Baca, was a protege of Major Murphy, who sent him to Notre Dame
+University, Indiana, to be educated. "Bonnie" Baca was at different
+times clerk of the probate court, county assessor, deputy sheriff, etc.,
+and was court interpreter under Judge Warren H. Bristol. He was teaching
+school at the time Sheriff Brady was shot, and from his refuge in the
+"round tower," a few feet distant, saw Brady fall. Captain Baca, wife
+and son, were after that closely watched by the men of the McSween
+faction, but managed to remain neutral and never became involved in the
+fighting, though Billy the Kid more than once threatened to kill young
+Baca.]
+
+The death of Crawford ended the second day's fighting. Peppin's party
+now numbered sixteen men from the Seven Rivers country, or twenty-eight
+in all. The McSween men besieged in the adobe were Billy the Kid, Harvey
+Norris (killed), Tom O'Folliard, Ighenio Salazar (wounded and left for
+dead), Ignacio Gonzales, Jose Semora (killed), Francisco Romero
+(killed), and Alexander A. McSween, leader of the faction (killed). Doc
+Skurlock, Jack Middleton, and Charlie Bowdre were in the adjoining store
+building.
+
+At about noon of the third day, old Andy Boyle, ex-soldier of the
+British army, said, "We'll have to get a cannon and blow in the doors.
+I'll go up to the fort and steal a cannon." Half-way up to the fort, he
+found his cannon--two Gatling guns and a troop of colored
+cavalry--already on the road to stop what had been reported as firing on
+women and children. The detachment was under charge of the commanding
+officer of Fort Stanton, Colonel Dudley, who marched his men past the
+beleaguered house and drew them up below the place. Colonel Dudley was
+besought by Mrs. McSween, who came out under fire, to save her husband's
+life; but he refused to interfere or take side in the matter, saying
+that the sheriff of the county was there and in charge of his own posse.
+Mrs. McSween refused to accept protection and go up to the post, but
+returned to her husband for what she knew must soon be the end.
+
+McSween, ex-minister, lawyer, honest or dishonest instigator, innocent
+or malicious cause--and one may choose his adjectives in this matter--of
+all these bloody scenes, now sat in the house, his head bowed in his
+hands, the picture of foreboding despair. His nerve was absolutely gone.
+No one paid any attention to him. His wife, the actual leader, was far
+braver than he. The Kid was the commander. "They'd kill us all if we
+surrendered," he said. "We'll shoot it out!"
+
+Old Andy Boyle got some sticks and some coal oil, and, under protection
+of rifles, started a fire against a street door of the house. Jack Long
+and two others also fired the house in the rear. A keg of powder had
+been concealed under the floor. The flames reached this powder, and
+there was an explosion which did more than anything else toward ending
+the siege.
+
+At about dusk, Bob Beckwith, old man Pierce, and one other man, ran
+around toward the rear of the house. Beckwith called out to the inmates
+to surrender. They demanded that the sheriff come for a parley. "I'm a
+deputy sheriff," replied Beckwith. It was dark or nearly so. Several
+figures burst out of the rear door of the burning house, among these the
+unfortunate McSween. Around him, and ahead of him, ran Billy the Kid,
+Skurlock, French, O'Folliard, Bowdre, and a few others. The flashing of
+six-shooters at close range ended the three days' battle. McSween, still
+unarmed, dropped dead. He was found, half sitting, leaning against the
+corral wall. Bob Beckwith, of the Peppin forces, fell almost at the same
+time, killed by Billy the Kid. Near McSween's body lay those of Romero
+and Semora and of Harvey Norris. The latter was a young Kansan, newly
+arrived in that country, of whom little was known.
+
+[Illustration: 1. IGHENIO SALAZAR 2. ALEX. A. McSWEEN 3. CAPT. S. BACA
+(1) Shot and left for dead, in the Lincoln County War. (2) Leader of a
+faction in the Lincoln County War. (3) Friend of Kit Carson; the man who
+carried the news of the big street fight to Ft. Stanton]
+
+With the McSween party, there was one game Mexican, Ighenio Salazar, who
+is alive to-day, by miracle. In the rush from the house, Salazar was
+shot down, being struck by two bullets. He feigned death. Old Andy Boyle
+stood over him with his gun cocked. "I guess he's dead," said Andy. "If
+I thought he wasn't, I shoot him some more." They then jumped on
+Salazar's body to assure themselves. In the darkness, Salazar rolled
+over into a ditch, later made his escape, stopped his wounds with some
+corn husks, and found concealment in a Mexican house until he
+subsequently recovered.
+
+This fight cost McSween his life just at the point when he thought he
+had attained success. Four days before he was killed, he had word from
+the United States Government's commissioner, Angell, that the President
+had deposed Governor Axtell of New Mexico, on account of his appointment
+of Dad Peppin as sheriff, and on charges that Axtell was favoring the
+Murphy faction. General Lew Wallace was now sent out as Governor of New
+Mexico, invested with "extraordinary powers." He needed them. President
+Hayes had issued governmental proclamation calling upon these desperate
+fighting men to lay down their arms, but it was not certain they would
+easily be persuaded. It was a long way to Washington, and a short way to
+a six-shooter.
+
+General Wallace assured Mrs. McSween of protection, but he found there
+was no such thing as getting to the bottom of the Lincoln County War. It
+would have been necessary to hang the entire population of the county to
+execute a formal justice. Almost none of the indictments "stuck," and
+one by one the cases were dismissed. The thing was too big for the law.
+
+The only man ever actually indicted and brought to trial for a killing
+during the Lincoln County War was Billy the Kid, and there is many a
+resident of Lincoln to-day who declares that the Kid was made a
+scapegoat; and many a man even to-day charges Governor Wallace with bad
+faith. Governor Wallace met the Kid by appointment at the Ellis House in
+Lincoln. The Kid came in fully armed, and the old soldier was surprised
+to see in him a bright-faced and pleasant-talking boy. In the presence
+of two witnesses now living, Governor Wallace asked the Kid to come in
+and lay down his arms, and promised to pardon him if he would stand his
+trial and if he should be convicted in the courts. The Kid declined.
+"There is no justice for me in the courts of this country now," said he.
+"I've gone too far." And so he went back with his little gang of
+outlaws, to meet a dramatic end, after further incidents in a singular
+and blood-stained career.
+
+The Lincoln County War now spread wider than even the boundaries of the
+United States. A United States deputy, Wiederman, had been employed by
+the father of the murdered J. H. Tunstall to take care of the Tunstall
+estates and to secure some kind of British revenge for his murder.
+Wiederman falsely persuaded Tunstall _pere_ that he had helped kill
+Frank Baker and Billy Morton, and Tunstall _pere_ made him rich,
+Wiederman going to England, where it was safer. The British legation
+took up the matter of Tunstall's death, and the slow-moving governmental
+wheels at Washington began to revolve. A United States indemnity was
+paid for Tunstall's life.
+
+Mrs. McSween, meantime, kept up her work in the local courts. Some time
+after her husband's death, she employed a lawyer by the name of Chapman,
+of Las Vegas, a one-armed man, to undertake the dangerous task of aiding
+her in her work of revenge. By this time, most of the fighters were
+disposed to lay down their arms. The whole society of the country had
+been ruined by the war. Murphy & Co. had long ago mortgaged everything
+they had, and a good many things which they did not have, _e. g._, some
+of John Chisum's cattle, to Tom Catron, of Sante Fe. A big peace talk
+was made in the town, and it was agreed that, as there was no longer any
+advantage of a financial nature in keeping up the war, all parties
+concerned might as well quit organized fighting, and engage in
+individual pillage instead. Murphy & Co. were ruined. Murphy and McSween
+were both dead. Chisum could be depended upon to pay some of the debts
+to the warriors through stolen cattle, if not through signed checks.
+Why, then, should good, game men go on killing each other for nothing?
+This was the argument used.
+
+[Illustration: 1. MRS. SATURNINO BACA (In early life) 2. MRS. SUSAN E.
+BARBER 3. MRS. SATURNINO BACA (At sixty)
+The "women in the case" in the Lincoln County War. Mrs. Susan E. Barber
+was known as the "Cattle Queen of the West"]
+
+In this conference there were, on the Murphy side, Jesse Evans, Jimmie
+Dolan and Bill Campbell. On the other side were Billy the Kid, Tom
+O'Folliard and the game Mexican, Salazar. Each of these men had a .45
+Colt at his belt, and a cocked Winchester in his hand. At last, however,
+the six men shook hands. They agreed to end the war. Then, frontier
+fashion, they set off for the nearest saloon.
+
+The Las Vegas lawyer, Chapman, happened to cross the street as these
+desperate fighting men, used to killing, now well drunken, came out, all
+armed, and all swearing friendship.
+
+"Halt, you, there!" cried Bill Campbell to Chapman; and the latter
+paused. "Damn you," said Campbell to Chapman; "you are the ---- ---- of
+a ---- that has come down here to stir up trouble among us fellows.
+We're peaceful. It's all settled, and we're friends now. Now, damn you,
+just to show you're peaceable too, you dance."
+
+"I'm a gentleman," said Chapman, "and I'll dance for no ruffian." An
+instant later, shot through the heart by Campbell's six-shooter, as is
+alleged, he lay dead in the roadway. No one dared disturb his body. He
+was shot at such close range that some papers in his coat pocket took
+fire from the powder flash, and his body was partially consumed as it
+lay there in the road.
+
+For this killing, Jimmie Dolan, Billy Matthews and Bill Campbell were
+indicted and tried. Dolan and Matthews were acquitted. Campbell, in
+default of a better jail, was kept in the guard-house at Fort Stanton.
+One night he disappeared, in company with his guard and some United
+States cavalry horses. Since then nothing has been heard of him. His
+real name was not Campbell, but Ed Richardson.
+
+Billy the Kid did not kill John Chisum, though all the country wondered
+at that fact. There was a story that he forced Chisum to sign a bill of
+sale for eight hundred head of cattle. He claimed that Chisum owed money
+to the McSween fighting men, to whom he had promised salaries which
+were never paid; but no evidence exists that Chisum ever made such a
+promise, although he sometimes sent a wagonload of supplies to the
+McSween fighting men.
+
+John Chisum died of cancer at Eureka Springs, Missouri, December 26,
+1884, and his great holdings as a cattle king afterward became somewhat
+involved. He could once have sold out for $600,000, but later mortgaged
+his holdings for $250,000. He was concerned in a packing plant at Kansas
+City, a business into which he was drawn by others, and of which he knew
+nothing.
+
+Major Murphy died at Sante Fe before the big fight at Lincoln. Jimmie
+Dolan died a few years later, and lies buried in the little graveyard
+near the Fritz ranch. Riley, the other member of the firm, went to
+Colorado, and was last heard of at Rocky Ford, where he was prosperous.
+The heritage of hatred was about all that McSween left to his widow, who
+presently married George L. Barber, at Lincoln, and later proved herself
+to be a good business woman--good enough to make a fortune in the cattle
+business from the four hundred head of cattle John Chisum gave her to
+settle a debt he had owed McSween. She afterward established a fine
+ranch near Three Rivers, New Mexico.
+
+Dad Peppin, known as the "Murphy sheriff" by the McSween faction, lived
+out his life on his little holding at the edge of Lincoln _placita_. He
+died in 1905. His rival, John Copeland, died in 1902. The street of
+Lincoln, one of the bloodiest of its size in the world, is silent.
+Another generation is growing up. William Brady, Major Brady's eldest
+son, and Josefina Brady-Chavez, a daughter, live in Lincoln; and Bob
+Brady, another son of the murdered sheriff, was long jailer at Lincoln
+jail. The law has arisen over the ruin wrought by lawlessness. It is a
+noteworthy fact that, although the law never punished the participants
+in this border conflict, the lawlessness was never ended by any
+vigilante movement. The fighting was so desperate and prolonged that it
+came to be held as warfare and not as murder. There is no doubt that,
+barring the border fighting of Kansas and Missouri, this was the
+greatest of American border wars.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XV
+
+The Stevens County War--_The Bloodiest County Seat War of the
+West_--_The Personal Narrative of a Man Who Was Shot and Left for
+Dead_--_The Most Expensive United States Court Case Ever Tried_.
+
+
+In the month of May, 1886, the writer was one of a party of
+buffalo-hunters bound for the Neutral Strip and the Panhandle of Texas,
+where a small number of buffalo still remained at that time. We traveled
+across the entire southwestern part of Kansas, below the Santa Fe
+railroad, at a time when the great land boom of 1886 and 1887 was at its
+height. Town-site schemes in western Kansas were at that time
+innumerable, and a steady stream of immigration was pouring westward by
+rail and wagon into the high and dry plains of the country, where at
+that time farming remained a doubtful experiment. In the course of our
+travels, we saw one morning, rising before us in the mirage of the
+plains, what seemed to be a series of crenelated turrets, castles peaked
+and bastioned. We knew this was but the mirage, and knew that it must
+have some physical cause. But what was a town doing in that part of the
+world? We drove on and in a few hours found the town--a little, raw boom
+town of unpainted boards and tents, which had sprung up almost overnight
+in that far-off region. The population was that of the typical frontier
+town, and the pronounced belief of all was that this settlement was to
+be the commercial metropolis of the Southwest. This little town was
+later known as Woodsdale, Kansas. It offered then no hint of the bloody
+scenes in which it was soon to figure; but within a few weeks it was so
+deeply embroiled in war with the rival town of Hugoton as to make
+history notable even on that turbulent frontier.
+
+Mr. Herbert M. Tonney, now a prosperous citizen of Flora, Illinois, was
+a resident of that portion of the country in the stirring days of the
+land boom, and became involved to an extent beyond his own seeking in
+this county seat fight. While serving as an officer of the peace, he was
+shot and left for dead. No story can serve so well as his personal
+narrative to convey a clear idea of the causes, methods and results of a
+typical county seat war in the West. His recountal follows:
+
+"I do not need to swear to the truthfulness of my story, for I have
+already done so in many courts and under the cross-examination of some
+of the ablest lawyers in the country. I have repeated the story on the
+stand in a criminal case which cost the United States government more
+money than it has ever expended in any similar trial, unless perhaps
+that having to do with the assassination of President Lincoln. I can say
+that I know what it is to be murdered.
+
+"In March, 1886, I moved out into southwestern Kansas, in what was later
+to be known as Stevens county, then a remote and apparently unattractive
+region. In 1885 a syndicate of citizens of McPherson, Kansas, had been
+formed for the purpose of starting a new town in southwestern Kansas.
+The members were leading bankers, lawyers, and merchants. These sent out
+an exploration party, among which were such men as Colonel C. E. Cook,
+former postmaster of McPherson; his brother, Orrin Cook, a lawyer; John
+Pancoast, J. B. Chamberlain, J. W. Calvert, John Robertson, and others.
+They located a section of school lands, in what was later known as
+Stevens county, as near the center of the proposed county as the range
+of sand dunes along the Cimarron river would permit. Others of the party
+located lands as close to the town site as possible. On August 3, 1886,
+Governor Martin issued a proclamation for the organization of Stevens
+county. It appeared upon the records of the State of Kansas that the new
+county had 2,662 _bona-fide_ inhabitants, of whom 868 were householders.
+These claimed a taxable property, in excess of legal exemptions,
+amounting to $313,035, including railroad property of $140,380. I need
+not state that the organization was wholly based upon fraud. An election
+was called for September 9, and the town of Hugoton--at first called
+Hugo--was chosen.
+
+"There can be competition in the town-site business, however. At Mead
+Center, Kansas, there resided an old-time Kansas man, Colonel S. N.
+Wood, who also wanted a town site in the new county. Wood's partner,
+Captain I. C. Price, went down on July 3 to look over the situation. He
+was not known to the Hugoton men, and he was invited by Calvert, the
+census taker, to register his name as a citizen. He protested that he
+was only a visitor, but was informed that this made no possible
+difference; whereupon, Price proceeded to register his own name, that of
+his partner, those of many of his friends, and many purely imaginary
+persons. He also registered the families of these persons, and
+finally--in a burst of good American humor--went so far as to credit
+certain single men of his acquaintance with large families, including
+twenty or thirty pairs of twins! This cheerful imagination on his part
+caused trouble afterwards; but certain it is that these fictitious
+names, twins and all, went into the sworn records of Hugoton--an unborn
+population of a defunct town, whose own conception was in iniquity!
+
+"Price located a section of government land on the north side of the
+sand hills, eight miles from Hugoton, and this was duly platted for a
+town site. Corner lots were selling at Hugoton for $1,000 apiece, and
+people were flocking to that town. The new town was called Woodsdale,
+and Colonel Wood offered lots free to any who would come and build upon
+them. Settlers now streamed to Woodsdale. Tents, white-topped wagons and
+frail shanties sprung up as though by magic. The Woodsdale boom
+attracted even homesteaders who had cast in their lot with Hugoton. Many
+of these forgot their oaths in the land office, pulled up and filed on
+new quarter sections nearer to Woodsdale. The latter town was jubilant.
+Colonel Wood and Captain Price, in the month of August, held a big
+ratification meeting, taunting the men of Hugoton with those thirty
+pairs of twins that never were on land or sea. A great deal of bad blood
+was engendered at this time.
+
+"Soon after this Wood and Price started together for Garden City. They
+were followed by a band of Hugoton men and captured in a dugout on the
+Cimarron river. Brought back to Hugoton, a mock trial was held upon them
+and they were released on a mock bond, being later taken out of town
+under guard. A report was printed in the Hugoton paper that certain
+gentlemen of that town had gone south with Colonel Wood and Captain
+Price, 'for the purpose of a friendly buffalo hunt.' It was the
+intention to take these two prisoners into the wild and lawless region
+of No Man's Land, or the Panhandle of Texas, there to kill them, and to
+bring back the report that they were accidentally killed in the buffalo
+chase. This strange hunting party did go south, across No Man's Land
+and into the desert region lying around the headwaters of the Beaver.
+The prisoners knew what they were to expect, but, as it chanced, their
+captors did not dare kill them. Meantime, Woodsdale had organized a
+'posse' of twenty-four men, under Captain S. O. Aubrey, the noted
+frontier trailer, formerly an Indian scout. This band, taking up the
+trail below Hugoton, followed and rescued Wood and Price, and took
+prisoners the entire Hugoton 'posse.' The latter were taken to Garden
+City, and here the law was in turn set at defiance by the Woodsdale men,
+the horses, wagons, arms, etc., of the Hugoton party being put up and
+sold in the court to pay the board of the teams, expenses of
+publication, etc. Colonel Wood bought these effects in at public
+auction.
+
+"By this time, Stevens county had been organized and the Hugoton 'pull'
+was in the ascendency. A continuance had been taken at Garden City by
+the Hugoton prisoners, who were charged with kidnapping. The papers in
+this case were sent down from Finney county to the first session of the
+District Court of Stevens county. The result was foregone. Tried by
+their friends, the prisoners were promptly discharged.
+
+"The feeling between the two towns was all the time growing more bitter.
+Cases had been brought against Calvert, the census-taker, for perjury,
+and action was taken looking toward the setting aside of the
+organization of the county. The Kansas legislature, however, now met,
+and the political 'pull' of Hugoton was still strong enough to secure a
+special act legalizing the organization of Stevens county. It was now
+the legislature against the Supreme Court; for a little later the
+Supreme Court declared that the organization had been made through open
+fraud and by means of perjury.
+
+"Naturally, trouble might have been expected at the fall election. There
+were two centers of population, two sets of leaders, two clans,
+separated by only eight miles of sand hills. There could be but one
+county seat and one set of officers. Here Woodsdale began to suffer, for
+her forces were divided among themselves.
+
+"Colonel Wood, the leader of this community, had slated John M. Cross as
+his candidate for sheriff. A rival for the nomination was Sam Robinson,
+who owned the hotel at Woodsdale, and had invested considerable money
+there. Robinson was about forty years of age, and was known to be a bad
+man, credited with two or three killings elsewhere. Wood had always been
+able to flatter him and handle him; but when Cross was declared as the
+nominee for sheriff, Robinson became so embittered that he moved over to
+Hugoton, where he was later chosen town marshal and township constable.
+Hugoton men bought his hotel, leaving Robinson in the position of
+holding real estate in Woodsdale without owning the improvements on it.
+Hence when the town-site commissioners began to issue deeds, Robinson
+was debarred from claiming a deed by reason of the hotel property having
+been sold. Bert Nobel, a friend of Robinson's, sold his drug store and
+moved over with Robinson to Hugoton. Hugoton bought other property of
+Woodsdale malcontents, leaving the buildings standing at Woodsdale and
+taking the citizens to themselves. The Hugoton men put up as their
+candidate one Dalton, and declared him elected. Wood contested the
+election, and finally succeeded in getting his man Cross declared as
+sheriff of Stevens county.
+
+"It was now proposed to issue bonds for a double line of railroad
+across this county, such bonds amounting to eight thousand dollars per
+mile. At this time, the population was largely one of adventurers, and
+there was hardly a foot of deeded land in the entire county. In the
+discussion over this bond election, Robinson got into trouble with the
+new sheriff, in which Robinson was clearly in the wrong, as he had no
+county jurisdiction, being at the time of the altercation outside of his
+own township and town. Later on, a warrant for Robinson's arrest was
+issued and placed in the hands of Ed Short, town marshal of Woodsdale.
+Short was known as a killer, and hence as a fit man to go after
+Robinson.[I] He went to Hugoton to arrest Robinson, and there was a
+shooting affair, in which the citizens of Hugoton protected their man.
+The Woodsdale town marshal, however, still retained his warrant and
+cherished his purpose of arresting his man.
+
+[Footnote I: This man, Ed. Short, later came to a tragic end. A man of
+courage, as has been intimated, he had assisted in the capture of a
+member of the famous Dalton gang, one Dave Bryant, who had robbed a Rock
+Island express train, and was taking him to Wichita, Kansas, to jail. On
+the way Short had occasion to go into the smoker of the train, leaving
+the prisoner in charge of the express messenger, whom Short had
+furnished with a revolver. By some means Bryant became possessed of this
+revolver, held up the messenger, and was in the act of jumping from the
+swiftly moving train, when Short came out of the smoker. Catching sight
+of Short, Bryant fired and struck him, Short returning the fire, and
+both falling from the train together, dead.]
+
+"On July 22 of this year, 1888, Short learned that Sam Robinson, the two
+Cooks, and a man by the name of Donald, together with some women and
+children, had gone on a picnic down in the Neutral Strip, south of the
+Stevens county line. Short raised a 'posse' of four or five men and
+started after Robinson, who was surprised in camp near Goff creek. There
+was a parley, which resulted in Robinson escaping on a fast horse, which
+was tied near the shack where he was stopping with his wife and
+children. Short, meantime, had sent back word to Woodsdale, stating that
+he needed help to take Robinson. Meantime, also, the Hugoton men,
+learning that Short had started down after Robinson, had sent out two
+strong parties to rescue the latter. A battle was imminent.
+
+"It was at this time that I myself appeared upon the scene of this
+turbulent and lawless drama, although, in my own case, I went as a
+somewhat unwilling participant and as a servant of the law, not
+anticipating consequences so grave as those which followed.
+
+"The sheriff of the county, John M. Cross, on receiving the message from
+Short, called for volunteers, which was equivalent to summoning a
+'posse.' He knew there was going to be trouble, and left his money and
+watch behind him, stating that he feared for the result of his errand.
+His 'posse' was made up of Ted Eaton, Bob Hubbard, Rolland Wilcox, and
+myself. At that time I was only a boy, about nineteen years of age.
+
+"We had a long and hard ride to Reed's camp, on Goff creek, whence Short
+had sent up his message. Arriving there, we found Reed, who was catching
+wild horses, together with a man by the name of Patterson and another
+man, but Short was not in sight. From Reed we learned that Robinson had
+gotten away from Short, who had started back, leaving word for Mr.
+Cross, should he arrive, to return home. A band of men from Hugoton, we
+learned later, had overtaken Short and his men and chased them for
+twenty-five miles, but the latter reached Springfield, Seward county,
+unharmed.
+
+"Robinson, who had made his escape to a cow camp and thence to Hugoton
+upon a fresh horse, now met and led down into the Strip one of the first
+Hugoton 'posses.' Among them were Orrin Cook, Charles Cook, J. W.
+Calvert, J. B. Chamberlain, John Jackson, John A. Rutter, Fred Brewer,
+William Clark, and a few others. Robinson was, of course, the leader of
+this band.
+
+"After Sheriff Cross asked me to go down with him to see what had become
+of Ed Short, I went over and got Wilcox and we rode down to the
+settlement of Voorhees. Thence we rode to Goff creek, and all reached
+Reed's camp about seven or eight o'clock on Wednesday morning, July 25,
+1888. Here we remained until about five o'clock of that afternoon, when
+we started for home. Our horses gave out, and we got off and led them
+until well on into the night.
+
+"At about moonrise, we came to a place in the Neutral Strip known as the
+'Hay Meadows,' where there was a sort of pool of standing water, at
+which settlers cut a kind of coarse hay. There was in camp there, making
+hay, an old man by the name of A. B. Haas, of Voorhees, and with him
+were his sons, C. and Keen Haas, as well as Dave Scott, a Hugoton
+partisan. When we met these people here, we concluded to stop for a
+while. Eaton and Wilcox got into the wagon-box and lay down. My horse
+got loose and I was a few minutes in repicketing him. I had not been
+lying down more than twenty minutes, when we were surprised by the
+Hugoton 'posse' under Robinson. The latter had left the trail, which
+came down from the northeast, and were close upon us. They had evidently
+been watching us during the evening with field-glasses, as they seemed
+to know where we had stopped, and had completely surrounded us before we
+knew of their being near us.
+
+"The first I heard was Cross exclaiming, 'They have got us!' At that
+time there was shooting, and Robinson called out, 'Boys, close in!' He
+called out to Cross, 'Surrender, and hold up your hands!' Our arms were
+mostly against the haystacks. Not one of us fired a shot, or could have
+done so at that moment.
+
+"Sheriff Cross, Hubbard, and myself got up and stood together. We held
+up our hands. They did not seem to notice Wilcox and Eaton, who were
+lying in the wagon. Robinson called out to Cross, 'Give up your arms!'
+
+"'I have no arms,' replied Cross. He explained that his Winchester was
+on his saddle and that he had no revolver.
+
+"'I know better than that,' said Robinson. 'Search him!' Some one of the
+Hugoton party then went over Cross after weapons, and told Robinson that
+he had no arms.
+
+"'I know better,' reiterated Robinson. The others stood free at that
+moment, and Robinson exclaimed, 'Sheriff Cross, you are my first man.'
+He raised his Winchester and fired at Cross, a distance of a few feet,
+and I saw Cross fall dead at my side. It was all a sort of trance or
+dream to me. I did not seem to realize what was going on, but knew that
+I could make no resistance. My gun was not within reach. I knew that I,
+too, would be shot down.
+
+[Illustration: THE McSWEEN STORE AND BANK; PROMINENT IN THE LINCOLN
+COUNTY WAR]
+
+"Hubbard had now been disarmed, if indeed he had on any weapon. Robinson
+remarked to him, 'I want you, too!' and as he spoke he raised his
+Winchester and shot him dead, Hubbard also falling close to where I
+stood, his murderer being but a few feet from him.
+
+"I knew that my turn must come pretty soon. It was Chamberlain who was
+to be my executioner, J. B. Chamberlain, chairman of the board of county
+commissioners of Stevens county, and always prominent in Hugoton
+matters. Chamberlain was about eight feet from me, or perhaps less, when
+he raised his rifle deliberately to kill me. There were powder burns on
+my neck and face from the shot, as the woman who cared for me on the
+following day testified in court.
+
+"I saw the rifle leveled, and realized that I was going to be killed.
+Instinctively, I flinched to one side of the line of the rifle. That
+saved my life. The ball entered the left side of my neck, about
+three-quarters of an inch from the carotid artery and about half an inch
+above the left clavicle, coming out through the left shoulder. I felt no
+pain at the time, and, indeed, did not feel pain until the next day. The
+shock of the shot knocked me down and numbed me, and I suppose I lay a
+minute or two before I recovered sensation or knew anything about my
+condition. It was supposed by all that I was killed, and, in a vague
+way, I agreed that I must be killed; that my spirit was simply present
+listening and seeing.
+
+"Eaton had now got out of the wagon, and he started to run towards the
+horses. Robinson and one or two others now turned and pursued him, and I
+heard a shot or so. Robinson came back and I heard him say, 'I have shot
+the ---- ---- ---- who drew a gun on me!'
+
+"Then I heard the Hugoton men talking and declaring that they must have
+the fifth man of our party, whom they had not yet found. At this time,
+old man Haas and his sons came and stood near where I was and saw me
+looking up. The former, seeing that I was not dead, asked me where I
+had been shot. 'They have shot my arm off,' I answered him. At this
+moment I heard the Hugoton men starting toward me, and I dropped back
+and feigned death. Haas did not betray me. The Hugoton men now lit
+matches and peered into the faces of their victims to see if they were
+dead. I kept my eyes shut when the matches were held to my face, and
+held my breath.
+
+"They finally found Wilcox, I do not know just where, but they stood him
+up within fifteen feet of where I was lying feigning death. They asked
+Wilcox what he had been doing there, and he replied that he had just
+been down on the Strip looking around.
+
+"'That's a damned lie!' replied Robinson, the head executioner. As he
+spoke, he raised his Winchester and fired. Wilcox fell, and as he lay he
+moaned a little bit, as I heard:
+
+"'Put the fellow out of his misery,' remarked Robinson, carelessly. Some
+one then apparently fired a revolver shot and Wilcox became silent.
+
+"Some one came to me, took hold of my foot, and began to pull me around
+to see whether I was dead. Robinson wanted it made sure. Chamberlain, my
+executioner, said, 'He's dead; I gave him a center shot. I don't need
+shoot a man twice at that distance.' Either Chamberlain or some one else
+took me by the legs, dragged me about, and kicked me in the side,
+leaving bruises which were visible for many days afterwards. I feigned
+death so well that they did not shoot me again. They did shoot a second
+time each of the others who lay near me. We found seven cartridges on
+the ground near where the killing was done. Eaton was shot at a little
+distance from us, and I do not know whether he was shot more than once
+or not.
+
+"The haymakers were now in trouble, and said that they could not go on
+putting up their hay with the corpses lying around. Robinson told them
+to hitch up and follow the Hugoton party away. They did this, and after
+a while I was left lying there in the half-moonlight, with the dead
+bodies of my friends for company.
+
+"After the party had been gone about twenty minutes, I found I could get
+on my feet, although I was very weak. At first, I went and examined
+Wilcox, Cross, and Hubbard, and found they were quite dead. Their belts
+and guns were gone. Then I went to get my horse. It was hard for me to
+get into the saddle, and it has always seemed to me providential that I
+could do so at all. My horse was very wild and difficult to mount under
+ordinary circumstances. Now, it seemed to me that he knew my plight. It
+is certain that at that time and afterwards he was perfectly quiet and
+gentle, even when I laboriously tried to get into the saddle.
+
+"At a little distance, there was a buffalo wallow, with some filthy
+water in it. I led my horse here, lay down in the water, and drank a
+little of it. After that I rode about fifteen or sixteen miles along a
+trail, not fully knowing where I was going. In the morning, I met
+constable Herman Cann, of Voorhees, who had been told by the Haas party
+of the foregoing facts. Of course, we might expect a Hugoton 'posse' at
+any time. As a matter of fact, the same crowd who did the killing
+(fifteen of them, as I afterwards learned), after taking the haymakers
+back toward the State of Kansas, returned on their hunt for one of
+Short's men, who they supposed was still in that locality. It was
+probably not later than one or two o'clock in the morning when they
+found me gone.
+
+"Our butchers now again sat down on the ground near the bodies of their
+victims, and they seem to have enjoyed themselves. There was talk that
+some beer bottles were emptied and left near the heads of their victims
+as markers, but whether this was deliberately done I cannot say.
+
+"Constable Cann later hid me in the middle of a cornfield. This, no
+doubt, saved my life, for the Hugoton scouts were soon down there the
+next morning, having discovered that one of the victims had come to
+life. Woodsdale had sent out two wagons with ice to bring in the bodies
+of the dead men, but these Hugoton scouts met them and made them ride
+through Hugoton, so that the assembled citizens of that town might see
+the corpses. The county attorney, William O'Connor, made a speech,
+demanding that Hugoton march on Woodsdale and kill Wood and Ed Short.
+
+"By this time, of course, all Woodsdale was also under arms. My friends
+gathered from all over the countryside, a large body of them, heavily
+armed. Mr. Cann, the constable, had tried to take me to Liberal, but I
+could not stand the ride. I was then taken to the house of a doctor in
+the settlement at LaFayette. On the second night after the massacre I
+was taken to Woodsdale by about twenty of the Woodsdale boys, who came
+after me. We arrived at Woodsdale about daybreak next morning. In our
+night trip we could see the skyrocket signals used by the Robinson-Cook
+gang.
+
+"After my arrival at Woodsdale, it might have been supposed that all the
+country was in a state of war, instead of living in a time of modern
+civilization. Entrenchments were thrown up, rifle pits were dug, and
+stands established for sharp-shooters. Guards were thrown out all around
+the town, and mounted scouts continued to scour the country. Hugoton,
+expecting that Woodsdale would make an organized attack in retaliation,
+was quite as fully fortified in every way. Had there been a determined
+leader, the bloodshed would have been much greater. Of course, the
+result of this state of hostilities was that the governor sent out the
+militia, and there were investigations, and, later on, arrests and
+trials. The two towns literally fought each other to the death.
+
+"The murder of Sheriff Cross occurred in 1888. The militia were
+withdrawn within about thirty days thereafter. Both towns continued to
+break the law--in short, agreed jointly to break the law. They drew up
+a stipulation, it is said, under which Colonel Wood was to have all the
+charges against the Hugoton men dismissed. In return, Wood was to have
+all the charges against him in Hugoton dismissed, and was to have safe
+conduct when he came up to court. Not even this compounding of felony
+was kept as a pact between these treacherous communities.
+
+"The trial lagged. Wood was once more under bond to appear at Hugoton,
+before the court of his enemy, Judge Botkin, and among many other of his
+Hugoton enemies. On the day that Colonel Wood was to go for his trial,
+June 23, 1891, he drove up in a buggy. In the vehicle with him were his
+wife and a Mrs. Perry Carpenter. Court was held in the Methodist church.
+At the time of Wood's arrival, the docket had been called and a number
+of cases set for trial, including one against Wood for arson--there was
+no crime in the calendar of which one town did not accuse the other,
+and, indeed, of which the citizens of either were not guilty.
+
+"Wood left the two ladies sitting in the buggy, near the door, and
+stepped up to the clerk's desk to look over some papers. As he went in,
+he passed, leaning against the door, one Jim Brennan, a deputy of
+Hugoton, who did not seem to notice him. Brennan was a friend of C. E.
+Cook, then under conviction for the Hay Meadows massacre. Brennan stood
+talking to Mrs. Wood and Mrs. Carpenter, smiling and apparently
+pleasant. Colonel Wood turned and came down towards the door, again
+passing close to Brennan but not speaking to him. He was almost upon the
+point of climbing to his seat in the buggy, when Brennan, without a word
+and without any sort of warning, drew a revolver and shot him in the
+back. Wood wheeled around, and Brennan shot him the second time, through
+the right side. Not a word had been spoken by any one. Wood now started
+to run around the corner of the house. His wife, realizing now what was
+happening, sprang from the buggy-seat and followed to protect him.
+Brennan fired a third time, but missed. Mrs. Wood, reaching her
+husband's side, threw her arms around his neck. Brennan coming close up,
+fired a fourth shot, this time through Wood's head. The murdered man
+fell heavily, literally in his wife's arms, and for the moment it was
+thought both were killed. Brennan drew a second revolver, and so stood
+over Wood's corpse, refusing to surrender to any one but the sheriff of
+Morton county.
+
+"The presiding judge at this trial was Theodosius Botkin, a figure of
+peculiar eminence in Kansas at that time. Botkin gave Brennan into the
+custody of the sheriff of Morton county. He was removed from the county,
+and it need hardly be stated that when he was at last brought back for
+trial it was found impossible to empanel a jury, and he was set free. No
+one was ever punished for this cold-blooded murder.
+
+"Colonel S. N. Wood was an Ohio man, but moved to Kansas in the early
+Free Soil days. He was a friend and champion of old John Brown and a
+colonel of volunteers in the civil war. He had served in the legislature
+of Kansas, and was a good type of the early and adventurous pioneer.
+
+"Whether or not suspicion attached to Judge Botkin for his conduct in
+this matter, he himself seems to have feared revenge, for he held court
+with a Winchester at his hand and a brace of revolvers on the desk in
+front of him, his court-house always surrounded with an armed guard. He
+offended men in Seward county, and there was a plot made to kill him. A
+party lay in wait along the road to intercept Botkin on his journey from
+his homestead--every one in Kansas at that time had a 'claim'--but
+Botkin was warned by some friend. He sent out Sam Dunn, sheriff of
+Seward county, to discover the truth of the rumor. Dunn went on down the
+trail and, in a rough part of the country, was fired upon and killed,
+instead of Botkin. Arrests were made in this matter also, but the sham
+trials resulted much as had that of Brennan. The records of these trials
+may be seen in Seward county. It was murder for murder, anarchy for
+anarchy, evasion for evasion, in this portion of the frontier. Judge
+Botkin soon after this resigned his seat upon the bench and went to
+lecturing upon the virtues of the Keeley cure. Afterwards he went to the
+legislature--the same legislature which had once tried him on charges of
+impeachment as a judge!
+
+"These events all became known in time, and lawlessness proved its own
+inability to endure. The towns were abandoned. Where in 1889 there were
+perhaps 4,000 people, there remained not 100. The best of the farms were
+abandoned or sold for taxes, the late inhabitants of the two warring
+settlements wandering out over the world. The legislature, hoodwinked or
+cajoled heretofore, at length disorganized the county, and anarchy gave
+back its own to the wilderness.
+
+"I have indicated that the trial of the men guilty of assassinating my
+friends and of attempting to kill myself in the Hay Meadow butchery was
+one which reached a considerable importance at the time. The crimes were
+committed in that strange portion of the country called No Man's Land or
+the Neutral Strip. The accused were tried in the United States court at
+Paris, Texas. I myself drew the indictments against them. There were
+tried the Cooks, Chamberlain, Robinson and others of the Hugoton party,
+and of these six were convicted and sentenced to be hung. These men were
+defended by Colonel George R. Peck, later chief counsel of the Chicago,
+Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway. With him were associated Judge John F.
+Dillon, of New York; W. H. Rossington, of St. Louis; Senator Manderson,
+of Nebraska; Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, and others. The Knights of
+Pythias raised a fund to defend the prisoners, and spent perhaps a
+hundred thousand dollars in all in this undertaking. A vast political
+'pull' was exercised at Topeka and Washington. After the sentence had
+been passed, the case was taken up to the United States Supreme Court,
+on the ground that the Texas court had no jurisdiction in the premises,
+and on the further grounds of errors in the trial. The United States
+Supreme Court, in 1891, reversed the Texas court, on an error on the
+admission of evidence, and remanded the cases. The men were never put on
+trial again, except that, in 1898, Sam Robinson, meantime pardoned out
+of the penitentiary in Colorado, where he had been sent for robbing the
+United States mails at Florissant, Colorado, returned to Texas, and was
+arrested on the old charge. The men convicted were C. E. Cook, Orrin
+Cook, Cyrus C. Freese, John Lawrence and John Jackson.
+
+"The Illinois legislature petitioned Congress to extend United States
+jurisdiction over No Man's Land, and so did the state of Indiana; and it
+was attached to the East District of Texas for the purposes of
+jurisdiction. Congressman Springer held up this bill for a time, using
+it as a club for the passage of a measure of his own upon which he was
+intent. Thus, it may be seen that the tawdry little tragedy in that
+land which indeed was 'No Man's Land' in time attained a national
+prominence.
+
+"The collecting of the witnesses for this trial cost the United States
+government over one hundred thousand dollars. The trial was long and
+bitterly fought. It resulted, as did every attempt to convict those
+concerned in the bloody doings of Stevens county, in an absolute failure
+of the ends of justice. Of all the murders committed in that bitter
+fighting, not one murderer has ever been punished! Never was greater
+political or judicial mockery.
+
+"I had the singular experience, once in my life, of eating dinner at the
+same table with the man who brutally shot me down and left me for dead.
+J. B. Chamberlain, the man who shot me, and who thought he had killed
+me, came in with a friend and sat down at the same table in a
+Leavenworth, Kansas, restaurant, where I was eating. My opportunity for
+revenge was there. I did not take it. Chamberlain and his friend did not
+know who I was. I left the matter to the law, with what results the
+records of the law's failure in these matters has shown.
+
+"Of those who were tried for these murders, J. B. Chamberlain is now
+dead. C. E. Cook, who was much alarmed lest the cases might be
+reinstated in the year 1898, claims Quincy, Illinois, as his home, but
+has interests in Florida. O. J. Cook is dead. Jack Lawrence is dead.
+John Kelley is dead. Other actors in the drama, unconvicted, are also
+dead or nameless wanderers. As the indictments were all quashed in 1898,
+Sam Robinson, whose whereabouts is unknown, will never be brought to
+trial for his deeds in the Hay Meadow butchery. He was not tried at
+Paris, being then in the Colorado penitentiary. His friend and partner,
+Bert Nobel, who was sent to the penitentiary for seven years for
+participating in the postoffice robbery, was pardoned out, and later
+killed a policeman at Trinidad, Colorado. He was tried there and hanged.
+So far as I know, this is the only legal punishment ever inflicted upon
+any of the Hugoton or Woodsdale men, who outvied each other in a
+lawlessness for which anarchy would be a mild name."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVI
+
+Biographies of Bad Men--_Desperadoes of the Deserts_--_Billy the Kid,
+Jesse Evans, Joel Fowler, and Others Skilled in the Art of Gun
+Fighting_.
+
+
+The desert regions of the West seemed always to breed truculence and
+touchiness. Some of the most desperate outlaws have been those of
+western Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. These have sometimes been
+Mexicans, sometimes half-breed Indians, very rarely full-blood or
+half-blood negroes. The latter race breeds criminals, but lacks in the
+initiative required in the character of the desperado. Texas and the
+great arid regions west of Texas produced rather more than their full
+quota of bad white men who took naturally to the gun.
+
+By all means the most prominent figure in the general fighting along the
+Southwestern border, which found climax in the Lincoln County War, was
+that historic and somewhat romantic character known as Billy the Kid,
+who had more than a score of killings to his credit at the time of his
+death at the age of twenty-one. His character may not be chosen as an
+exemplar for youth, but he affords an instance hardly to be surpassed of
+the typical bad man.
+
+The true name of Billy the Kid was William H. Bonney, and he was born in
+New York City, November 23, 1859. His father removed to Coffeyville, on
+the border of the Indian Nations, in 1862, where soon after he died,
+leaving a widow and two sons. Mrs. Bonney again moved, this time to
+Colorado, where she married again, her second husband being named
+Antrim. All the time clinging to what was the wild border, these two now
+moved down to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where they remained until Billy was
+eight years of age. In 1868, the family made their home at Silver City,
+New Mexico, where they lived until 1871, when Billy was twelve years of
+age. His life until then had been one of shifting about, in poverty or
+at best rude comfort. His mother seems to have been a wholesome
+Irishwoman, of no great education, but of good instincts. Of the boy's
+father nothing is known; and of his stepfather little more, except that
+he was abusive to the stepchildren. Antrim survived his wife, who died
+about 1870. The Kid always said that his stepfather was the cause of his
+"getting off wrong."
+
+The Kid was only twelve years old when, in a saloon row in which a
+friend of his was being beaten, he killed with a pocket-knife a man who
+had previously insulted him. Some say that this was an insult offered to
+his mother; others deny it and say that the man had attempted to
+horsewhip Billy. The boy turned up with a companion at Fort Bowie, Pima
+county, Arizona, and was around the reservation for a while. At last he
+and his associate, who appears to have been as well saturated with
+border doctrine as himself at tender years, stole some horses from a
+band of Apaches, and incidentally killed three of the latter in a night
+attack. They made their first step at easy living in this enterprise,
+and, young as they were, got means in this way to travel about over
+Arizona. They presently turned up at Tucson, where Billy began to employ
+his precocious skill at cards; and where, presently, in the
+inevitable gambler's quarrel, he killed another man. He fled across
+the line now into old Mexico, where, in the state of Sonora, he set up
+as a youthful gambler. Here he killed a gambler, Jose Martinez, over a
+monte game, on an "even break," being the fraction of a second the
+quicker on the draw. He was already beginning to show his natural
+fitness as a handler of weapons. He kept up his record by appearing next
+at Chihuahua and robbing a few monte dealers there, killing one whom he
+waylaid with a new companion by the name of Segura.
+
+[Illustration: BILLY THE KID
+Said to have slain twenty-two men in his short career. Killed when
+twenty-one years old by Sheriff Pat F. Garrett]
+
+The Kid was now old enough to be dangerous, and his life had been one of
+irresponsibility and lawlessness. He was nearly at his physical growth
+at this time, possibly five feet seven and a half inches in height, and
+weighing a hundred and thirty-five pounds. He was always slight and
+lean, a hard rider all his life, and never old enough to begin to take
+on flesh. His hair was light or light brown, and his eyes blue or
+blue-gray, with curious red hazel spots in them. His face was rather
+long, his chin narrow but long, and his front teeth were a trifle
+prominent. He was always a pleasant mannered youth, hopeful and buoyant,
+never glum or grim, and he nearly always smiled when talking.
+
+The Southwestern border at this time offered but few opportunities for
+making an honest living. There were the mines and there were the cow
+ranches. It was natural that the half-wild life of the cow punchers
+would sooner or later appeal to the Kid. He and Jesse Evans met
+somewhere along the lower border a party of punchers, among whom were
+Billy Morton and Frank Baker, as well as James McDaniels; the last named
+being the man who gave Billy his name of "The Kid," which hung to him
+all his life.
+
+The Kid arrived in the Seven Rivers country on foot. In his course east
+over the mountains from Mesilla to the Pecos valley he had been mixed up
+with a companion, Tom O'Keefe, in a fight with some more Apaches, of
+whom the Kid is reported to have killed one or more. There is no doubt
+that the Guadalupe mountains, which he crossed, were at that time a
+dangerous Indian country. That the Kid worked for a time for John
+Chisum, on his ranch near Roswell, is well known, as is the fact that he
+cherished a grudge against Chisum for years, and was more than once upon
+the point of killing him for a real or fancied grievance. He left
+Chisum and took service with J. H. Tunstall on his Feliz ranch late in
+the winter of 1877, animated by what reason we may not know. In doing
+this, he may have acted from pique or spite or hatred. There was some
+quarrel between him and his late associates. Tunstall was killed by the
+Murphy faction on February 18, 1878. From that time, the path of the Kid
+is very plain and his acts well known and authenticated. He had by this
+time killed several men, certainly at least two white men; and how many
+Mexicans and Indians he had killed by fair means or foul will never be
+really known. His reputation as a gun fighter was well established.
+
+Dick Brewer, Tunstall's foreman, was now sworn in as a "special deputy"
+by McSween, and a war of reprisal was now on. The Kid was soon in the
+saddle with Brewer and after his former friends, all Murphy allies.
+There were about a dozen in this posse. On March 6, 1878, these men
+discovered and captured a band of five men, including Frank Baker and
+Billy Morton, both old friends of the Kid, at the lower crossing of the
+Rio Penasco, some six miles from the Pecos. The prisoners were kept
+over night at Chisum's ranch, and then the posse started with them for
+Lincoln, not taking the Hondo-Bonito trail, but one _via_ the Agua
+Negra, on the east side of the Capitans; proof enough that something
+bloody was in contemplation, for that was far from any settlements.
+Apologists of the Kid say that Morton and Baker "tried to escape," and
+that the Kid followed and killed them. The truth in all probability is
+that the party, sullen and bloody-minded, rode on, waiting until wrath
+or whiskey should inflame them so as to give resolution for the act they
+all along intended. The Kid, youngest but most determined of the band,
+no doubt did the killing of Billy Morton and Frank Baker; and in all
+likelihood there is truth in the assertion that they were on their knees
+and begging for their lives when he shot them. McClosky was killed by
+McNab, on the principle that dead men tell no tales. This killing was on
+March 9, 1878. The murder of Sheriff William Brady and George Hindman by
+the Kid and his half-dozen companions occurred April 1, 1878, and it is
+another act which can have no palliation whatever.
+
+The Kid was now assuming prominence as a gun fighter and leader, young
+as he was. After the big fight in Lincoln was over, and the McSween
+house in flames, the Kid was leader of the sortie which took him and a
+few of his companions to safety. The list of killings back of him was
+now steadily lengthening, and, indeed, one murder followed another so
+fast all over that country that it was hard to keep track of them all.
+
+The killing of the Indian agency clerk, Bernstein, August 5, 1878, on a
+horse-stealing expedition, was the next act of the Kid and his men, who
+thereafter fled northeast, out through the Capitan Gap, to certain old
+haunts around Fort Sumner, some ninety miles north of Roswell, up the
+Pecos valley. Here a little band of outlaws, led by the Kid, lived for a
+time as they could by stealing horses along the Bonito and around the
+Capitans, and running them off north and east. There were in this band
+at the time the Kid, Charlie Bowdre, Doc Skurlock, Wayt, Tom O'Folliard,
+Hendry Brown and Jack Middleton. Some or all of these were in the march
+with stolen horses which the Kid engineered that fall, going as far east
+as Atacosa, on the Canadian, before the stock was all gotten rid of.
+Middleton, Wayt, and Hendry Brown there left the Kid's gang, telling him
+that he would get killed before long; but the latter laughed at them
+and returned to his old grounds, alternating between Lincoln and Fort
+Sumner, and now and then stealing some cows from the Chisum herd.
+
+In January, 1880, the Kid enlarged his list of victims by killing, in a
+very justifiable encounter, a bad man from the Panhandle by the name of
+Grant, who had been loafing around in his country, and who, no doubt,
+intended to kill the Kid for the glory of it. The Kid had, a few moments
+before he shot Grant, taken the precaution to set the hammer of the
+latter's revolver on an "empty," as he whirled it over in examination.
+They were apparently friends, but the Kid knew that Grant was drunk and
+bloodthirsty. He shot Grant twice through the throat, as Grant snapped
+his pistol in his face. Nothing was done with the Kid for this, of
+course.
+
+Birds of a feather now began to appear in the neighborhood of Fort
+Sumner, and the Kid's gang was increased by the addition of Tom Pickett,
+and later by Billy Wilson, Dave Rudabaugh, Buck Edwards, and one or two
+others. These men stole cattle now from ranges as far east as the
+Canadian, and sold them to obliging butcher-shops at the new mining
+camp of White Oaks, just coming into prominence; or, again, they took
+cattle from the lower Pecos herds and sold them north at Las Vegas; or
+perhaps they stole horses at the Indian reservation and distributed them
+along the Pecos valley. Their operations covered a country more than two
+hundred miles across in either direction. They had accomplices and
+friends in nearly every little _placita_ of the country. Sometimes they
+gave a man a horse as a present. If he took it, it meant that they could
+depend upon him to keep silent. Partly by friendliness and partly by
+terrorizing, their influence was extended until they became a power in
+all that portion of the country; and their self-confidence had now
+arisen to the point that they thought none dared to molest them, while
+in general they behaved in the high-handed fashion of true border
+bandits. This was the heyday of the Kid's career.
+
+It was on November 27, 1880, that the Kid next added to his list of
+killings. The men of White Oaks, headed by deputy sheriff William
+Hudgens, saloon-keeper of White Oaks, formed a posse, after the fashion
+of the day, and started out after the Kid, who had passed all bounds in
+impudence of late. In this posse were Hudgens and his brother, Johnny
+Hudgens, Jim Watts, John Mosby, Jim Brent, J. P. Langston, Ed. Bonnell,
+W. G. Dorsey, J. W. Bell, J. P. Eaker, Charles Kelly, and Jimmy Carlyle.
+They bayed up the Kid and his gang in the Greathouse ranch, forty miles
+from White Oaks, and laid siege, although the weather was bitterly cold
+and the party had not supplies or blankets for a long stay. Hudgens
+demanded the surrender of the Kid, and the latter said he could not be
+taken alive. Hudgens then sent word for Billy Wilson to come out and
+have a talk. The latter refused, but said he would talk with Jimmy
+Carlyle, if the latter would come into the house. Carlyle, against the
+advice of all, took off his pistol belt and stepped into the house. He
+was kept there for hours. About two o'clock in the afternoon they heard
+the window glass crash and saw Carlyle break through the window and
+start to run. Several shots followed, and Carlyle fell dead, the bullets
+that killed him cutting dust in the faces of Hudgens' men, as they lay
+across the road from the house.
+
+This murder was a nail in the Kid's coffin, for Carlyle was well liked
+at White Oaks. By this time the toils began to tighten in all
+directions. The United States Government had a detective, Azariah F.
+Wild, in Lincoln county. Pat Garrett had now just been elected sheriff,
+and was after the outlaws. Frank Stewart, a cattle detective, with a
+party of several men, was also in from the Canadian country looking for
+the Kid and his gang for thefts committed over to the east of Lincoln
+county, across the lines of Texas and the Neutral Strip. The Kid at this
+time wrote to Captain J. C. Lea, at Roswell, that if the officers would
+leave him alone for a time, until he could get his stuff together, he
+would pull up and leave the country, going to old Mexico, but that if he
+was crowded by Garrett or any one else, he surely would start in and do
+some more killing. This did not deter Garrett, who, with a posse made up
+of Chambers, Barney Mason, Frank Stewart, Juan Roibal, Lee Halls, Jim
+East, "Poker Tom," "Tenderfoot Bob," and "The Animal," with others, all
+more or less game, or at least game enough to go as far as Fort Sumner,
+at length rounded up the Kid, and took him, Billy Wilson, Tom Pickett
+and Dave Rudabaugh; Garrett killing O'Folliard and Bowdre.
+
+Pickett was left at Las Vegas, as there was no United States warrant out
+against him. Rudabaugh was tried later for robbing the United States
+mails, later tried for killing his jailer, and was convicted and
+sentenced to be hung; but once more escaped from the Las Vegas jail and
+got away for good. The Kid was not so fortunate. He was tried at
+Mesilla, before Judge Warren H. Bristol, the same man whose life he was
+charged with attempting in 1879. Judge Bristol appointed Judge Ira E.
+Leonard, of Lincoln, to defend the prisoner, and Leonard got him
+acquitted of the charge of killing Bernstein on the reservation. He was
+next tried, at the same term of court, for the killing of Sheriff
+William Brady, and in March, 1881, he was convicted under this charge
+and sentenced to be hanged at Lincoln on May 13, 1881. He was first
+placed under guard of Deputies Bob Ollinger and Dave Woods, and taken
+across the mountains in the custody of Sheriff Garrett, who received his
+prisoner at Fort Stanton on April 21.
+
+Lincoln county was just beginning to emerge from savagery. There was no
+jail worth the name, and all the county could claim as a place for the
+house of law and order was the big store building lately owned by
+Murphy, Riley & Dolan. It was necessary to keep the Kid under guard for
+the three weeks or so before his execution, and Sheriff Garrett chose as
+the best available material Bob Ollinger and J. W. Bell, a good, quiet
+man from White Oaks, to act as the death watch over this dangerous man,
+who seemed now to be nearly at the end of his day.
+
+Against Bob Ollinger the Kid cherished an undying hatred, and longed to
+kill him. Ollinger hated him as much, and wanted nothing so much as to
+kill the Kid. He was a friend of Bob Beckwith, whom the Kid had killed,
+and the two had always been on the opposite sides of the Lincoln county
+fighting. Ollinger taunted the Kid with his deeds, and showed his own
+hatred in every way. There are many stories about what now took place in
+this old building at the side of bloody little Lincoln street. A common
+report is that in the evening of April 28, 1881, the Kid was left alone
+in the room with Bell, Ollinger having gone across the street for
+supper; that the Kid slipped his hands out of his irons--as he was able
+to do when he liked, his hands being very small--struck Bell over the
+head with his shackles while Bell was reading or was looking out of the
+window, later drawing Bell's revolver from its scabbard and killing him
+with it. This story is not correct. The truth is that Bell took the
+Kid, at his request, into the yard back of the jail; returning, the Kid
+sprang quickly up the stairs to the guard-room door, as Bell turned to
+say something to old man Goss, a cook, who was standing in the yard. The
+Kid pushed open the door, caught up a revolver from a table, and sprang
+to the head of the stairs just as Bell turned the angle and started up.
+He fired at Bell and missed him, the ball striking the left-hand side of
+the staircase. It glanced, however, and passed through Bell's body,
+lodging in the wall at the angle of the stair. Bell staggered out into
+the yard and fell dead. This story is borne out by the reports of Goss
+and the Kid, and by the bullet marks. The place is very familiar to the
+author, who at about that time practiced law in the same building, when
+it was used as the Court House, and who has also talked with many men
+about the circumstances.
+
+The Kid now sprang into the next room and caught up Ollinger's heavy
+shotgun, loaded with the very shells Ollinger had charged for him. He
+saw Ollinger coming across the street, and just as he got below the
+window at the corner of the building the Kid leaned over and said,
+coolly and pleasantly, "Hello, old fellow!" The next instant he fired
+and shot Ollinger dead. He then walked around through the room and out
+upon the porch, which at that time extended the full length of the
+building, and, coming again in view of Ollinger's body, took a second
+deliberate shot at it. Then he broke the gun across the railing and
+threw the pieces down on Ollinger's body. "Take that to hell with you,"
+he said coolly. Then, seeing himself free and once more king of Lincoln
+street, he warned away all who would approach, and, with a file which he
+compelled Goss to bring to him, started to file off one of his leg
+irons. He got one free, ordered a bystander to bring him a horse, and at
+length, mounting, rode away for the Capitans, and so to a country with
+which he had long been familiar. At Las Tablas he forced a Mexican
+blacksmith to free him of his irons. He sent the horse, which belonged
+to Billy Burt, back by some unknown friend the following night.
+
+He was now again on his native heath, a desperado and an outlaw indeed,
+and obliged to fight for his life at every turn; for now he knew the
+country would turn against him, and, as he had been captured through
+information furnished through supposed friends, he knew that treachery
+was what he might expect. He knew also that sheriff Garrett would never
+give him up now, and that one or the other of the two must die.
+
+Yet, knowing all these things, the Kid, by means of stolen horses, broke
+back once more to his old stamping grounds around Fort Sumner. Garrett
+again got on his trail, and as the Kid, with incredible fatuity, still
+hung around his old haunts, he was at length able to close with him once
+more. With his deputies, John Poe and Thomas P. McKinney, he located the
+Kid in Sumner, although no one seemed to be explicit as to his
+whereabouts. He went to Pete Maxwell's house himself, and there, as his
+two deputies were sitting at the edge of the gallery in the moonlight,
+he killed the Kid at Maxwell's bedside.
+
+Billy the Kid had very many actual friends, whom he won by his pleasant
+and cheerful manners and his liberality, when he had anything with which
+to be liberal, although that was not often. He was very popular among
+the Mexicans of the Pecos valley. As to the men the Kid killed in his
+short twenty-one years, that is a matter of disagreement. The usual
+story is twenty-one, and the Kid is said to have declared he wanted
+to kill two more--Bob Ollinger and "Bonnie" Baca--before he died, to
+make it twenty-three in all. Pat Garrett says the Kid had killed eleven
+men. Others say he had killed nine. A very few say that the Kid never
+killed any man without full justification and in self-defense. They
+regard the Kid as a scapegoat for the sins of others. Indeed, he was
+less fortunate than some others, but his deeds brought him his deserts
+at last, even as they left him an enduring reputation as one of the most
+desperate desperadoes ever known in the West.
+
+[Illustration: From a painting by John W. Norton
+"THE NEXT INSTANT HE FIRED AND SHOT OLLINGER DEAD"]
+
+Central and eastern New Mexico, from 1860 to 1880, probably held more
+desperate and dangerous men than any other corner of the West ever did.
+It was a region then more remote and less known than Africa is to-day,
+and no record exists of more than a small portion of its deeds of blood.
+Nowhere in the world was human life ever held cheaper, and never was any
+population more lawless. There were no courts and no officers, and most
+of the scattered inhabitants of that time had come thither to escape
+courts and officers. This environment which produced Billy the Kid
+brought out others scarcely less dangerous, and of a few of these there
+may be made passing mention.
+
+Joel Fowler was long considered a dangerous man. He was a ranch owner
+and cow man, but he came into the settlements often, and nearly always
+for the immediate purpose of getting drunk. In the latter condition he
+was always bloodthirsty and quarrelsome, and none could tell what or
+whom he might make the object of his attack. He was very insulting and
+overbearing, very noisy and obnoxious, the sort of desperado who makes
+unarmed men beg and compels "tenderfeet" to dance for his amusement. His
+birth and earlier life seem hidden by his later career, when, at about
+middle life, he lived in central New Mexico. He was accredited with
+killing about twenty men, but there may have been the usual exaggeration
+regarding this. His end came in 1884, at Socorro. He was arrested for
+killing his own ranch foreman, Jack Cale, a man who had befriended him
+and taken care of him in many a drunken orgy. He stabbed Cale as they
+stood at the bar in a saloon, and while every one thought he was
+unarmed. The law against carrying arms while in the settlements was then
+just beginning to be enforced; and, although it was recognized as
+necessary for men to go armed while journeying across those wild and
+little settled plains, the danger of allowing six-shooters and whiskey
+to operate at the same time was generally recognized as well. If a man
+did not lay aside his guns on reaching a town, he was apt to be invited
+to do so by the sheriff or town marshal, as Joel had already been asked
+that evening.
+
+Fowler's victim staggered to the door after he was stabbed and fell dead
+at the street, the act being seen by many. The law was allowed to take
+its course, and Fowler was tried and sentenced to be hanged. His lawyers
+took an appeal on a technicality and sent the case to the supreme court,
+where a long delay seemed inevitable. The jail was so bad that an
+expensive guard had to be maintained. At length, some of the citizens
+concluded that to hang Fowler was best for all concerned. They took him,
+mounted, to a spot some distance up the railroad, and there hanged him.
+Bill Howard, a negro section hand, was permitted by his section boss to
+make a coffin and bury Fowler, a matter which the Committee had
+neglected; and he says that he knows Fowler was buried there and left
+there for several years, near the railway tracks. The usual story says
+that Fowler was hanged to a telegraph pole in town. At any rate, he was
+hanged, and a very wise and seemly thing it was.
+
+Jesse Evans was another bad man of this date, a young fellow in his
+early twenties when he first came to the Pecos country, but good enough
+at gun work to make his services desirable. He was one of the very few
+men who did not fear Billy the Kid. He always said that the Kid might
+beat him with the Winchester, but that he feared no man living with the
+six-shooter. Evans came very near meeting an inglorious death. He and
+the notorious Tom Hill once held up an old German in a sheep camp near
+what is now Alamagordo, New Mexico. The old man did not know that they
+were bad men, and while they were looting his wagon, looking for the
+money he had in a box under the wagon seat, he slipped up and killed Tom
+Hill with his own gun, which had been left resting against a bush near
+by, nearly shooting Hill's spine out. Then he opened fire on Jesse, who
+was close by, shooting him twice, through the arm and through the lungs.
+The latter managed to get on his horse, bareback, and rode that night,
+wounded as he was, and partly trailed by the blood from his lungs,
+sixty miles or more to the San Augustine mountains, where he holed up at
+a friendly ranch, later to be arrested by Constable Dave Wood, from the
+railway settlements. In default of better jurisdiction, he was taken to
+Fort Stanton, where he lay in the hospital until he got ready to escape,
+when he seems to have walked away. Evans and his brother, who was known
+as George Davis--the latter being the true name of both--then went down
+toward Pecos City and got into a fight with some rangers, who killed his
+brother on the spot and captured Jesse, who was confined in the Texas
+penitentiary for twenty years. He escaped and was returned; yet in the
+year 1882, when he should have been in the Texas prison, he is said to
+have been seen and recognized on the streets of Lincoln. Evans, or
+Davis, is said to have been a Texarkana man, and to have returned to his
+home soon after this, only to find his wife living with another man, and
+supposing her first husband dead. He did not tell the new husband of his
+presence, but took away with him his boy, whom he found now well grown.
+It was stated that he went to Arizona, and nothing more is known of him.
+
+Tom Hill, the man above mentioned as killed by the sheep man, was a
+typical rough, dark, swarthy, low-browed, as loud-mouthed as he was
+ignorant. He was a braggart, but none the less a killer.
+
+Charlie Bowdre is supposed to have been a Texas boy, as was Tom Hill.
+Bowdre had a little ranch on the Rio Ruidoso, twenty miles or so from
+Lincoln; but few of these restless characters did much farming. It was
+easier to steal cattle, and to eat beef free if one were hungry. Bowdre
+joined Billy the Kid's gang and turned outlaw for a trade. It was all
+over with his chances of settling down after that. He was a man who
+liked to talk of what he could do, and a very steady practicer with the
+six-shooter, with which weapon he was a good shot, or just good enough
+to get himself killed by sheriff Pat Garrett.
+
+Frank Baker, murdered by his former friend, Billy the Kid, at Agua
+Negra, near the Capitans, was part Cherokee in blood, a well-spoken and
+pleasant man and a good cow hand. He was drawn into this fighting
+through his work for Chisum as a hired man. Baker was said to be
+connected with a good family in Virginia, who looked up the facts of his
+death.
+
+Billy Morton, killed with Baker by the Kid, was a similar instance of a
+young man loving the saddle and six-shooter and finally getting tangled
+up with matters outside his proper sphere as a cow hand. He had often
+ridden with the Kid on the cow range. He was said to have been with the
+posse that killed Tunstall.
+
+Hendry Brown was a crack gun fighter, whose services were valued in the
+posse fighting. He went to Kansas and long served as marshal of
+Caldwell. He could not stand it to be good, and was killed after robbing
+the bank and killing the cashier.
+
+Johnny Hurley was a brave young man, as brave as a lion. Hurley was
+acting as deputy for sheriff John Poe, together with Jim Brent, when the
+desperado Arragon was holed up in an adobe and refused to surrender. The
+Mexican shot Hurley as he carelessly crossed an open space directly in
+front of the door. Hurley was brown-haired and blue-eyed; a very
+pleasant fellow.
+
+Andy Boyle, one of the rough and ruthless sort of warriors, was an
+ex-British soldier, a drunkard, and a good deal of a ruffian. He drank
+himself to death after a decidedly mixed record.
+
+John McKinney had a certain fame from the fact that in the fight at the
+McSween house the Kid shot off half his mustache for him at close range,
+when the latter broke out of cover and ran.
+
+The tough buffalo hunter, Bill Campbell, who figured largely in bloody
+deeds in New Mexico, was arrested, but escaped from Fort Stanton, and
+was never heard from afterward. He came from Texas, but little is known
+of him. His name, as earlier stated, is thought to have been Ed.
+Richardson.
+
+Captain Joseph C. Lea, the staunch friend of Pat Garrett, and the man
+who first brought him forward as a candidate for sheriff of Lincoln
+county, died February 8, 1904, at Roswell, where he lived for a long
+time. Lea was said to have been a Quantrell man in the Lawrence
+massacre. Much of the population of that region had a history that was
+never written. Lea was a good man and much respected, peaceable,
+courteous and generous.
+
+One more southwestern bad man found Texas congenial after the close of
+his active fighting, and his is a striking story. Billy Wilson was a
+gentlemanly and good-looking young fellow, who ran with Billy the Kid's
+gang. Wilson was arrested on a United States warrant, charged with
+passing counterfeit money; but he later escaped and disappeared. Several
+years after all these events had happened, and after the country had
+settled down into quiet, a certain ex-sheriff of Lincoln county chanced
+to be near Uvalde, Texas, for several months. There came to him without
+invitation, a former merchant of White Oaks, New Mexico, who told the
+officer that Billy Wilson, under another name, was living below Uvalde,
+towards the Mexican frontier. He stated that Wilson had been a cow hand,
+a ranch foreman and cow man, was now doing well, had resigned all his
+bad habits, and was a good citizen. He stated that Wilson had heard of
+the officer's presence and asked whether the latter would not forego
+following up a reformed man on the old charges of another and different
+day. The officer replied at once that if Wilson was indeed leading a
+right life, and did not intend to go bad again, he would not only leave
+him alone, but would endeavor to secure for him a pardon from the
+president of the United States. Less than six months from that time,
+this pardon, signed by President Grover Cleveland, was in the possession
+of this officer, in his office in a Rio Grande town of New Mexico. A
+telegram was sent to Billy Wilson, and he was brave man enough to come
+and take his chances. The officer, without much speech, went over to his
+safe, took out the signed pardon from the president, and handed it to
+Wilson. The latter trembled and broke into tears as he took the paper.
+"If you ever need my life," said he, "count on me. And I'll never go
+back on this!" as he touched the executive pardon. He went back to
+Texas, and is living there to-day, a good citizen. It would be wrong to
+mention names in an incident like this.
+
+Tom O'Folliard was another noted character. He was something of a gun
+expert, in his own belief, at least. He was a man of medium height and
+dark complexion, and of no very great amount of mental capacity. He came
+into the lower range from somewhere east, probably from Texas, and
+little is known of him except that he was in some fighting, and that he
+is buried at Sumner with Bowdre and the Kid. He got away with one or two
+bluffs and encounters, and came to think that he was as good as the best
+of men, or rather as bad as the worst; for he was one of those who
+wanted a reputation as a bad man.
+
+Tom Pickett was another not far from the O'Folliard class, ambitious to
+be thought wild and woolly and hard to curry; which he was not, when it
+came to the real currying, as events proved. He was a very pretty
+handler of a gun, and took pride in his skill with it. He seems to have
+behaved well after the arrest of the Kid's gang near Sumner, and is not
+known in connection with any further criminal acts, though he still for
+a long time wore two guns in the settlements. Once a well-known sheriff
+happened, by mere chance, to be in his town, not knowing Pickett was
+there. The latter literally took to the woods, thinking something was on
+foot in which he was concerned. Being reminded that he had lost an
+opportunity to show how bad he was he explained: "I don't want anything
+to do with that long-legs." Pickett, no doubt, settled down and became a
+useful man. Indeed, although it seems a strange thing to say, it is the
+truth that much of the old wildness of that border was a matter of
+general custom, one might also say of habit. The surroundings were wild,
+and men got to running wild. When times changed, some of them also
+changed, and frequently showed that after all they could settle down to
+work and lead decent lives. Lawlessness is sometimes less a matter of
+temperament than of surroundings.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVII
+
+The Fight of Buckshot Roberts--_Encounter Between a Crippled Ex-Soldier
+and the Band of Billy the Kid_--_One Man Against Thirteen._
+
+
+Next to the fight of Wild Bill with the McCandlas gang, the fight of
+Buckshot Roberts at Blazer's Mill, on the Mescalero Indian reservation,
+is perhaps the most remarkable combat of one man against odds ever known
+in the West. The latter affair is little known, but deserves its record.
+
+Buckshot Roberts was one of those men who appeared on the frontier and
+gave little history of their own past. He came West from Texas, but it
+is thought that he was born farther east than the Lone Star state. He
+was long in the United States army, where he reached the rank of
+sergeant before his discharge; after which he lingered on the frontier,
+as did very many soldiers of that day. He was at one time a member of
+the famous Texas rangers, and had reputation as an Indian fighter. He
+had been badly shot by the Comanches. Again, he was on the other side,
+against the rangers, and once stood off twenty-five of them, although
+nearly killed in this encounter. From these wounds he was so badly
+crippled in his right arm that he could not lift a rifle to his
+shoulder. He was usually known as "Buckshot" Roberts because of the
+nature of his wounds.
+
+Roberts took up a little ranch in the beautiful Ruidoso valley of
+central New Mexico, one of the most charming spots in the world; and all
+he asked was to be let alone, for he seemed able to get along, and not
+afraid of work. When the Lincoln County War broke out, he was recognized
+as a friend of Major Murphy, one of the local faction leaders; but when
+the fighting men curtly told him it was about time for him to choose his
+side, he as curtly replied that he intended to take neither side; that
+he had seen fighting enough in his time, and would fight no man's battle
+for him. This for the time and place was treason, and punishable with
+death. Roberts' friends told him that Billy the Kid and Dick Brewer
+intended to kill him, and advised him to leave the country.
+
+It is said that Roberts had closed out his affairs and was preparing to
+leave the country, when he heard that the gang was looking for him, and
+that he then gave them opportunity to find him. Others say that he went
+up to Blazer's Mill to meet there a friend of his by the name of Kitts,
+who, he heard, had been shot and badly wounded. There is other rumor
+that he went up to Blazer's Mill to have a personal encounter with Major
+Godfroy, with whom there had been some altercation. There is a further
+absurd story that he went for the purpose of killing Billy the Kid, and
+getting the reward which was offered for him. These latter things are
+unlikely. The probable truth is that he, being a brave man, though fully
+determined to leave the country, simply found it written in his creed to
+go up to Blazer's Mill to see his supposedly wounded friend, and also to
+see what there was in the threats which he had heard.
+
+There are living three eye-witnesses of what happened at that time:
+Frank and George Coe, ranchers on the Ruidoso to-day, and Johnnie
+Patten, cook on Carrizzo ranch. Patten was an ex-soldier of H Troop,
+Third Cavalry, and was mustered out at Fort Stanton in 1869. At the time
+of the Roberts fight, he was running the sawmill for Dr. Blazer. Frank
+Coe says that he himself was attempting to act as peacemaker, and that
+he tried to get Roberts to give up his arms and not make any fight.
+Patten says that he himself, at the peril of his life, had warned
+Roberts that Dick Brewer, the Kid, and his gang intended to kill him. It
+is certain that when Roberts came riding up on a mule, still wet from
+the fording of the Tularosa river, he met there Dick Brewer, Billy the
+Kid, George Coe, Frank Coe, Charlie Bowdre, Doc Middleton, one
+Scroggins, and Dirty Steve (Stephen Stevens), with others, to the number
+of thirteen in all. These men still claimed to be a posse, and were
+under Dick Brewer, "special constable."
+
+The Brewer party withdrew to the rear of the house. Frank Coe parleyed
+with Roberts at one side. Kate Godfroy, daughter of Major Godfroy,
+protested at what she knew was the purpose of Brewer and his gang. Dick
+Brewer said to his men, "Don't do anything to him now. Coax him up the
+road a way."
+
+Roberts declined to give up his weapons to Frank Coe. He stood near the
+door, outside the house. Then, as it is told by Johnnie Patten, who saw
+it all, there suddenly came around upon him from behind the house the
+gang of the Kid, all gun fighters, each opening fire as he came. The
+gritty little man gave back not a step toward the open door. Crippled by
+his old wounds so that he could not raise his rifle to his shoulder, he
+worked the lever from his hip. Here were a dozen men, the best fighting
+men of all that wild country, shooting at him at a distance of not a
+dozen feet; yet he shot Jack Middleton through the lungs, though failing
+to kill him. He shot a finger off the hand of George Coe, who then left
+the fight. Roberts then half stepped forward and pushed his gun against
+the stomach of Billy the Kid. For some reason the piece failed to fire,
+and the Kid was saved by the narrowest escape he ever had in his life.
+Charlie Bowdre now appeared around the corner of the house, and Roberts
+fired at him next. His bullet struck Bowdre in the belt, and cut the
+belt off from him. Almost at the same time, Bowdre fired at him and shot
+him through the body. He did not drop, but staggered back against the
+wall; and so he stood there, crippled of old and now wounded to death,
+but so fierce a human tiger that his very looks struck dismay into this
+gang of professional fighters. They actually withdrew around the house
+and left him there!
+
+Each claimed the credit for having shot the victim. "No," said Charlie
+Bowdre, "I shot him myself. I dusted him on both sides. I saw the dust
+fly out on both sides of his coat, where my bullet went clean through
+him." They argued, but they did not go around the house again.
+
+Roberts now staggered back into the house. He threw down his own
+Winchester and picked up a heavy Sharps' rifle which belonged to Dr.
+Appel, and which he found there, in Dr. Blazer's room. Brewer told Dr.
+Blazer to bring Roberts out, but, like a man, Blazer refused. Roberts
+pulled a mattress off the bed to the floor and threw himself down upon
+it near an open window in the front of the house. The gang had
+scattered, surrounding the house. Dick Brewer had taken refuge behind a
+thirty-inch sawlog near the mill, just one hundred and forty steps from
+the window near which this fierce little fighting man was lying, wounded
+to death. Brewer raised his head just above the top of the sawlog, so
+that he could see what Roberts was doing. His eyes were barely visible
+above the top of the log, yet at that distance the heavy bullet from
+Roberts' buffalo gun struck him in the eye and blew off the top of his
+head.
+
+Billy the Kid was now leader of the posse. His first act was to call his
+men together and ride away from the spot, his whole outfit whipped by a
+single man! There was a corpse behind them, and wounded men with them.
+
+Thirty-six hours later there was another corpse at Blazer's Mill. The
+doctor, brought over from Fort Stanton, could do nothing for Roberts,
+and he died in agony. Johnnie Patten, sawyer and rough carpenter, made
+one big coffin, and in this the two, Brewer and Roberts, were buried
+side by side. "I couldn't make a very good coffin," says Patten, "so I
+built it in the shape of a big V, with no end piece at the foot. We just
+put them both in together." And there they lie to-day, grim
+grave-company, according to the report of this eye-witness, who would
+seem to be in a position indicating accuracy. Emil Blazer, a son of Dr.
+Blazer, still lives on the site of this fierce little battle, and he
+says that the two dead men were buried separately, but side by side,
+Brewer to the right of Roberts. The little graveyard holds a few other
+graves, none with headboards or records, and grass now grows above them
+all.
+
+The building where Roberts stood at bay is now gone, and another adobe
+is erected a little farther back from the raceway that once fed the old
+mountain sawmill, but which now is not used as of yore. The old flume
+still exists where the water ran over onto the wheel, and the site of
+the old mill, which is now also torn down, is easily traceable. When the
+author visited the spot in the fall of 1905, all these points were
+verified and the distances measured. It was a long shot that Roberts
+made, and down hill. The vitality of the man who made it, his courage,
+and his tenacity alike of life and of purpose against such odds make
+Roberts a man remembered with admiration even to-day in that once bloody
+region.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVIII
+
+The Man Hunt--_The Western Peace Officer, a Quiet Citizen Who Works for
+a Salary and Risks His Life_--_The Trade of Man Hunting_--_Biography of
+Pat Garrett, a Typical Frontier Sheriff_.
+
+
+The deeds of the Western sheriff have for the most part gone
+unchronicled, or have luridly been set forth in fiction as incidents of
+blood, interesting only because of their bloodiness. The frontier
+officer himself, usually not a man to boast of his own acts, has quietly
+stepped into the background of the past, and has been replaced by others
+who more loudly proclaim their prominence in the advancement of
+civilization. Yet the typical frontier sheriff, the good man who went
+after bad men, and made it safe for men to live and own property and to
+establish homes and to build up a society and a country and a
+government, is a historical character of great interest. Among very
+many good ones, we shall perhaps best get at the type of all by giving
+the story of one; and we shall also learn something of the dangerous
+business of man hunting in a region filled with men who must be hunted
+down.
+
+Patrick Floyd Garrett, better known as Pat Garrett, was a Southerner by
+birth. He was born in Chambers county, Alabama, June 5, 1850. In 1856,
+his parents moved to Claiborne parish, Louisiana, where his father was a
+large landowner, and of course at that time and place, a slave owner,
+and among the bitter opponents of the new _regime_ which followed the
+civil war. When young Garrett's father died, the large estates dwindled
+under bad management; and when within a short time the mother followed
+her husband to the grave, the family resources, affected by the war,
+became involved, although the two Garrett plantations embraced nearly
+three thousand acres of rich Louisiana soil. On January 25, 1869, Pat
+Garrett, a tall and slender youth of eighteen, set out to seek his
+fortunes in the wild West, with no resources but such as lay in his
+brains and body.
+
+He went to Lancaster, in Dallas county, Texas. A big ranch owner in
+southern Texas wanted men, and Pat Garrett packed up and went home with
+him. The world was new to him, however, and he went off with the
+north-bound cows, like many another youngster of the time. His herd was
+made up at Eagle Lake, and he only accompanied the drive as far north as
+Denison. There he began to get uneasy, hearing of the delights of the
+still wilder life of the buffalo hunters on the great plains which lay
+to the west, in the Panhandle of Texas. For three winters, 1875 to 1877,
+he was in and out between the buffalo range and the settlements, by this
+time well wedded to frontier life.
+
+In the fall of 1877, he went West once more, and this time kept on going
+west. With two hardy companions, he pushed on entirely across the wild
+and unknown Panhandle country, leaving the wagons near what was known as
+the "Yellow Houses," and never returning to them. His blankets, personal
+belongings, etc., he never saw again. He and his friends had their heavy
+Sharps' rifles, plenty of powder and lead, and their reloading tools,
+and they had nothing else. Their beds they made of their saddle
+blankets, and their food they killed from the wild herds. For their
+love of adventure, they rode on across an unknown country, until finally
+they arrived at the little Mexican settlement of Fort Sumner, on the
+Pecos river, in the month of February, 1878.
+
+[Illustration: PAT F. GARRETT
+The most famous peace officer of the Southwest]
+
+Pat and his friends were hungry, but all the cash they could find was
+just one dollar and a half between them. They gave it to Pat and sent
+him over to the store to see about eating. He asked the price of meals,
+and they told him fifty cents per meal. They would permit them to eat
+but once. He concluded to buy a dollar and a half's worth of flour and
+bacon, which would last for two or three meals. He joined his friends,
+and they went into camp on the river bank, where they cooked and ate,
+perfectly happy and quite careless about the future.
+
+As they finished their breakfast, they saw up the river the dust of a
+cattle herd, and noted that a party were working a herd, cutting out
+cattle for some purpose or other.
+
+"Go up there and get a job," said Pat to one of the boys. The latter did
+go up, but came back reporting that the boss did not want any help.
+
+"Well, he's got to have help," said Pat. So saying, he arose and
+started up stream himself.
+
+Garrett was at that time, as has been said, of very great height, six
+feet four and one-half inches, and very slender. Unable to get trousers
+long enough for his legs, he had pieced down his best pair with about
+three feet of buffalo leggins with the hair out. Gaunt, dusty, and
+unshaven, he looked hard, and when he approached the herd owner and
+asked for work, the other was as much alarmed as pleased. He declined
+again, but Pat firmly told him he had come to go to work, and was sorry,
+but it could not be helped. Something in the quiet voice of Garrett
+seemed to arrest the attention of the cow man. "What can you do,
+Lengthy?" he asked.
+
+"Ride anything with hair, and rope better than any man you've got here,"
+answered Garrett, casting a critical glance at the other men.
+
+The cow man hesitated a moment and then said, "Get in." Pat got in. He
+stayed in. Two years later he was still at Fort Sumner, and married.
+
+Garrett moved down from Fort Sumner soon after his marriage, and settled
+a mile east of what is now the flourishing city of Roswell, at a spring
+on the bank of the Hondo, and in the middle of what was then the virgin
+plains. Here he picked up land, until he had in all more than twelve
+hundred and fifty acres. If he owned it now, he would be worth a half
+million dollars.
+
+He was not, however, to live the steady life of the frontier farmer. His
+friend, Captain J. C. Lea, of Roswell, came to him and asked if he would
+run as sheriff of Lincoln county. Garrett consented and was elected. He
+was warned not to take this office, and word was sent to him by the
+bands of hard-riding outlaws of that region that if he attempted to
+serve any processes on them he would be killed. He paid no attention to
+this, and, as he was still an unknown quantity in the country, which was
+new and thinly settled, he seemed sure to be killed. He won the absolute
+confidence of the governor, who told him to go ahead, not to stand on
+technicalities, but to break up the gang that had been rendering life
+and property unsafe for years and making the territory a mockery of
+civilization. If the truth were known, it might perhaps be found that
+sometimes Garrett arrested a bad man and got his warrant for it later,
+when he went to the settlements. He found a straight six-shooter the
+best sort of warrant, and in effect he took the matter of establishing a
+government in southwestern New Mexico in his own hands, and did it in
+his own way. He was the whole machinery of the law. Sometimes he boarded
+his prisoners out of his own pocket. He himself was the state! His word
+was good, even to the worst cutthroat that ever he captured. Often he
+had in his care prisoners whom, under the law, he could not legally have
+held, had they been demanded of him; but he held them in spite of any
+demand; and the worst prisoner on that border knew that he was safe in
+Pat Garrett's hands, no matter what happened, and that if Pat said he
+would take him through to any given point, he would take him through.
+
+After he had finished his first season of work as sheriff and as United
+States marshal, Garrett ranched it for a time. In 1884, his reputation
+as a criminal-taker being now a wide one, he organized and took charge
+of a company of Texas rangers in Wheeler county, Texas, and made Atacosa
+and thereabouts headquarters for a year and a half. So great became his
+fame now as a man-taker that he was employed to manage the affairs of a
+cattle detective agency; it being now so far along in civilization that
+men were beginning to be careful about their cows. He was offered ten
+thousand dollars to break up a certain band of raiders working in upper
+Texas, and he did it; but he found that he was really being paid to kill
+one or two men, and not to capture them; and, being unwilling to act as
+the agent of any man's revenge, he quit this work and went into the
+employment of the "V" ranch in the White mountains. He then moved down
+to Roswell again, in the spring of 1887. Here he organized the Pecos
+Valley Irrigation Company. He was the first man to suspect the presence
+of artesian water in this country, where the great Spring rivers push up
+from the ground; and through his efforts wells were bored which
+revolutionized all that valley. He ran for sheriff of Chaves county, and
+was defeated. Angry at his first reverse in politics, he pulled up at
+Roswell, and sacrificed his land for what he could get for it. To-day it
+is covered with crops and fruits and worth sixty to one hundred dollars
+an acre.
+
+Garrett now went back to Texas, and settled near Uvalde, where he
+engaged once more in an irrigation enterprise. He was here five years,
+ranching and losing money. W. T. Thornton, the governor of New Mexico,
+sent for him and asked him if he would take the office of sheriff of
+Donna Ana county, to fill the unexpired term of Numa Raymond. He was
+elected to serve two subsequent terms as sheriff of Donna Ana county,
+and no frontier officer has a better record for bravery.
+
+In the month of December, 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt, who had
+heard of Garrett, met him and liked him, and without any ado or
+consultation appointed him collector of customs at El Paso, Texas. Here
+for the next four years Garrett made a popular collector, and an honest
+and fearless one.
+
+The main reputation gained by Garrett was through his killing the
+desperado, Billy the Kid. It is proper to set down here the chronicle of
+that undertaking, because that will best serve to show the manner in
+which a frontier sheriff gets a bad man.
+
+When the Kid and his gang killed the agency clerk, Bernstein, on the
+Mescalero reservation, they committed a murder on United States
+government ground and an offense against the United States law. A United
+States warrant was placed in the hands of Pat Garrett, then deputy
+United States marshal and sheriff-elect, and he took up the trail,
+locating the men near Fort Sumner, at the ranch of one Brazil, about
+nine miles east of the settlement. With the Kid were Charlie Bowdre, Tom
+O'Folliard, Tom Pickett and Dave Rudabaugh, fellows of like kidney.
+Rudabaugh had just broken jail at Las Vegas, and had killed his jailer.
+Not a man of the band had ever hesitated at murder. They were now eager
+to kill Garrett and kept watch, as best they could, on all his
+movements.
+
+One day Garrett and some of his improvised posse were riding eastward of
+the town when they jumped Tom O'Folliard, who was mounted on a horse
+that proved too good for them in a chase of several miles. Garrett at
+last was left alone following O'Folliard, and fired at him twice. The
+latter later admitted that he fired twenty times at Garrett with his
+Winchester; but it was hard to do good shooting from the saddle at two
+or three hundred yards range, so neither man was hit. O'Folliard did not
+learn his lesson. A few nights later, in company with Tom Pickett, he
+rode into town. Warned of his approach, Garrett with another man was
+waiting, hidden in the shadow of a building. As O'Folliard rode up, he
+was ordered to throw up his hands, but went after his gun instead, and
+on the instant Garrett shot him through the body. "You never heard a man
+scream the way he did," said Garrett. "He dropped his gun when he was
+hit, but we did not know that, and as we ran up to catch his horse, we
+ordered him again to throw up his hands. He said he couldn't, that he
+was killed. We helped him down then, and took him in the house. He died
+about forty-five minutes later. He said it was all his own fault, and
+that he didn't blame anybody. I'd have killed Tom Pickett right there,
+too," concluded Garrett, "but one of my men shot right past my face and
+blinded me for the moment, so Pickett got away."
+
+The remainder of the Kid's gang were now located in the stone house
+above mentioned, and their whereabouts reported by the ranchman whose
+house they had just vacated. The man hunt therefore proceeded
+methodically, and Garrett and his men, of whom he had only two or three
+upon whom he relied as thoroughly game, surrounded the house just before
+dawn. Garrett, with Jim East and Tom Emory, crept up to the head of the
+ravine which made up to the ridge on which the fortress of the
+outlaws stood. The early morning is always the best time for a surprise
+of this sort. It was Charlie Bowdre who first came out in the morning,
+and as he stepped out of the door his career as a bad man ended. Three
+bullets passed through his body. He stepped back into the house, but
+only lived about twenty minutes. The Kid said to him, "Charlie, you're
+killed anyhow. Take your gun and go out and kill that long-legged ----
+before you die." He pulled Bowdre's pistol around in front of him and
+pushed him out of the door. Bowdre staggered feebly toward the spot
+where the sheriff was lying. "I wish--I wish----" he began, and motioned
+toward the house; but he could not tell what it was that he wished. He
+died on Garrett's blankets, which were laid down on the snow.
+
+[Illustration: From a painting by John W. Norton
+A TYPICAL WESTERN MAN HUNT Pat F. Garrett chasing Tom O'Folliard]
+
+Previous to this Garrett had killed one horse at the door beam where it
+was tied, and with a remarkable shot had cut the other free, shooting
+off the rope that held it. These two shots he thought about the best he
+ever made; and this is saying much, for he was a phenomenal shot with
+rifle or revolver. There were two horses inside, but the dead horse
+blocked the door. Pickett now told the gang to surrender. "That fellow
+will kill every man that shows outside that door," said he, "that's all
+about it. He's killed O'Folliard, and he's killed Charlie, and he'll
+kill us. Let's surrender and take a chance at getting out again." They
+listened to this, for the shooting they had seen had pretty well broken
+their hearts.
+
+Garrett now sent over to the ranch house for food for his men, and the
+cooking was too much for the hungry outlaws, who had had nothing to eat.
+They put up a dirty white rag on a gun barrel and offered to give up.
+One by one, they came out and were disarmed. That night was spent at the
+Brazil ranch, the prisoners under guard and the body of Charlie Bowdre,
+rolled in its blankets, outside in the wagon. The next morning, Bowdre
+was buried in the little cemetery next to Tom O'Folliard. The Kid did
+not know that he was to make the next in the row.
+
+These men surrendered on condition that they should all be taken through
+to Santa Fe, and Garrett, at the risk of his life, took them through Las
+Vegas, where Rudabaugh was wanted. Half the town surrounded the train in
+the depot yards. Garrett told the Kid that if the mob rushed in the
+door of the car he would toss back a six-shooter to him and ask him to
+help fight.
+
+"All right, Pat," said the Kid, cheerfully. "You and I can whip the
+whole gang of them, and after we've done it I'll go back to my seat and
+you can put the irons on again. You've kept your word." There is little
+doubt that he would have done this, but as it chanced there was no need,
+since at the last moment deputy Malloy, of Las Vegas, jumped on the
+engine and pulled the train out of the yard.
+
+Billy the Kid was tried and condemned to be executed. He had been
+promised pardon by Governor Lew Wallace, but the pardon did not come. A
+few days before the day set for his execution, the Kid, as elsewhere
+described, killed the two deputies who were guarding him, and got back
+once more to his old stamping grounds around Fort Sumner.
+
+"I knew now that I would have to kill the Kid," said Garrett to the
+writer, speaking reminiscently of the bloody scenes as we lately visited
+that country together. "We both knew that it must be one or the other of
+us if we ever met. I followed him up here to Sumner, as you know, with
+two deputies, John Poe and 'Tip' McKinney, and I killed him in a room
+up there at the edge of the old cottonwood avenue."
+
+He spoke of events now long gone by. It had been only with difficulty
+that we located the site of the building where the Kid's gang had been
+taken prisoners. The structure itself had been torn down and removed. As
+to the old military post, once a famous one, it offered now nothing
+better than a scene of desolation. There was no longer a single human
+inhabitant there. The old avenue of cottonwoods, once four miles long,
+was now ragged and unwatered, and the great parade ground had gone back
+to sand and sage brush. We were obliged to search for some time before
+we could find the site of the old Maxwell house, in which was ended a
+long and dangerous man hunt of the frontier. Garrett finally located the
+place, now only a rough quadrangle of crumbled earthen walls.
+
+"This is the place," said he, pointing to one corner of the grass-grown
+oblong. "Pete Maxwell's bed was right in this corner of the room, and I
+was sitting in the dark and talking to Pete, who was in bed. The Kid
+passed Poe and McKinney right over there, on what was then the gallery,
+and came through the door right here."
+
+We paused for a time and looked with a certain gravity at this
+wind-swept, desolate spot, around which lay the wide, unwinking desert.
+About us were the ruins of what had been a notable settlement in its
+day, but which now had passed with the old frontier.
+
+"I got word of the Kid up here in much the way I had once before,"
+resumed Garrett at length, "and I followed him, resolved to get him or
+to have him get me. We rode over into the edge of the town and learned
+that the Kid was there, but of course we did not know which house he was
+in. Poe went in to inquire around, as he was not known there like
+myself. He did not know the Kid when he saw him, nor did the Kid know
+him.
+
+"It was a glorious moonlight night; I can remember it perfectly well.
+Poe and McKinney and I all met a little way out from the edge of the
+place. We decided that the Kid was not far away. We went down to the
+houses, and I put Poe and McKinney outside of Pete Maxwell's house and I
+went inside. Right here was the door. We did not know it at that time,
+but just about then the Kid was lying with his boots off in the house
+of an old Mexican just across there, not very far away from Maxwell's
+door. He told the Mexican, when he came in, to cook something for him to
+eat. Maxwell had killed a beef not long before, and there was a quarter
+hanging up under the porch out in front. After a while, the Kid got up,
+got a butcher knife from the old Mexican, and concluded to go over and
+cut himself off a piece of meat from the quarter at Maxwell's house.
+This is how the story arose that he came into the house with his boots
+in his hand to keep an appointment with a Mexican girl.
+
+"The usual story is that I was down close to the wall behind Maxwell's
+bed. This was not the case, for the bed was close against the wall. Pete
+Maxwell was lying in bed, right here in this corner, as I said. I was
+sitting in a chair and leaning over toward him, as I talked in a low
+tone. My right side was toward him, and my revolver was on that side. I
+did not know that the Kid was so close at hand, or, indeed, know for
+sure that he was there in the settlement at all.
+
+"Maxwell did not want to talk very much. He knew the Kid was there, and
+knew his own danger. I was talking to him in Spanish, in a low tone of
+voice, as I say, when the Kid came over here, just as I have told you.
+He saw Poe and McKinney sitting right out there in the moonlight, but
+did not suspect anything. '_Quien es?_'--'Who is it?'--he asked, as he
+passed them. I heard him speak and saw him come backing into the room,
+facing toward Poe and McKinney. He could not see me, as it was dark in
+the room, but he came up to the bed where Maxwell was lying and where I
+was sitting. He seemed to think something might not be quite right. He
+had in his hand his revolver, a self-cocking .41. He could not see my
+face, and he had not heard my voice, or he would have known me.
+
+"The Kid stepped up to the bedside and laid his left hand on the bed and
+bent over Maxwell. He saw me sitting there in the half darkness, but did
+not recognize me, as I was sitting down. My height would have betrayed
+me had I been standing. 'Pete, _Quien es_?' he asked in a low tone of
+voice; and he half motioned toward me with his six-shooter. That was
+when I looked across into eternity. It wasn't far to go.
+
+"That was exactly how the thing was. I gave neither Maxwell nor the Kid
+time for anything farther. There flashed over my mind at once one
+thought, and it was that I had to shoot and shoot at once, and that my
+shot must go to the mark the first time. I knew the Kid would kill me in
+a flash if I did not kill him.
+
+"Just as he spoke and motioned toward me, I dropped over to the left and
+rather down, going after my gun with my right hand as I did so. As I
+fired, the Kid dropped back. I had caught him just about the heart. His
+pistol, already pointed toward me, went off as he fell, but he fired
+high. As I sprang up, I fired once more, but did not hit him, and did
+not need to, for he was dead.
+
+"I don't know that he ever knew who it was that killed him. He could not
+see me in the darkness. He may have seen me stoop over and pull. If he
+had had the least suspicion who it was, he would have shot as soon as he
+saw me. When he came to the bed, I knew who he was. The rest happened as
+I have told you. There is no other story about the killing of Billy the
+Kid which is the truth. It is also untrue that his body was ever removed
+from Fort Sumner. It lies there to-day, and I'll show you where we
+buried him. I laid him out myself, in this house here, and I ought to
+know."
+
+Twenty-five years of time had done their work in all that country, as we
+learned when we entered the little barbed-wire enclosure of the cemetery
+where the Kid and his fellows were buried. There are no headstones in
+this cemetery, and no sacristan holds its records. Again Garrett had to
+search in the salt grass and greasewood. "Here is the place," said he,
+at length. "We buried them all in a row. The first grave is the Kid's,
+and next to him is Bowdre, and then O'Folliard."
+
+Here was the sole remaining record of the man hunt's end. So passes the
+glory of the world! In this desolate resting-place, in a wind-swept and
+forgotten graveyard, rests all the remaining fame of certain bad men who
+in their time were bandit kings, who ruled by terror over half a Western
+territory. Even the headboard which once stood at the Kid's grave--and
+which was once riddled with bullets by cowards who would not have dared
+to shoot that close to him had he been alive--was gone. It is not likely
+that the graves will be visited again by any one who knows their
+locality. Garrett looked at them in silence for a time, then, turning,
+went to the buckboard for a drink at the canteen. "Well," said he,
+quietly, "here's to the boys, anyway. If there is any other life, I hope
+they'll make better use of it than they did of the one I put them out
+of."
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIX
+
+Bad Men of Texas--_The Lone Star State Always a Producer of
+Fighters_--_A Long History of Border War_--_The Death of Ben Thompson_.
+
+
+A review of the story of the American desperado will show that he has
+always been most numerous at the edge of things, where there was a
+frontier, a debatable ground between civilization and lawlessness, or a
+border between opposing nations or sections. He does not wholly pass
+away with the coming of the law, but his home is essentially in a new
+and undeveloped condition of society. The edge between East and West,
+between North and South, made the territory of the bad man of the
+American interior.
+
+The far Southwest was the oldest of all American frontiers, and the
+stubbornest. We have never, as a nation, been at war with any other
+nation whose territory has adjoined our own except in the case of
+Mexico; and long before we went to war as a people against Mexico, Texas
+had been at war with her as a state, or rather as a population and a
+race against another race. The frontier of the Rio Grande is one of the
+bloodiest of the world, and was such long before Texas was finally
+admitted to the union. There was never any new territory settled by so
+vigorous and belligerent a population as that which first found and
+defended the great empire of the Lone Star. Her early men were, without
+exception, fighters, and she has bred fighters ever since.
+
+The allurement which the unsettled lands of the Southwest had for the
+young men of the early part of the last century lay largely in the
+appeal of excitement and adventure, with a large possibility of worldly
+gain as well. The men of the South who drifted down the old River Road
+across Mississippi and Louisiana were shrewd in their day and
+generation. They knew that eventually Texas would be taken away from
+Mexico, and taken by force. Her vast riches would belong to those who
+had earned them. Men of the South were even then hunting for another
+West, and here was a mighty one. The call came back that the fighting
+was good all along the line; and the fighting men of all the South, from
+Virginia to Louisiana, fathers and sons of the boldest and bravest of
+Southern families, pressed on and out to take a hand. They were
+scattered and far from numerous when they united and demanded a
+government of their own, independent of the far-off and inefficient head
+of the Mexican law. They did not want Coahuila as their country, but
+Texas, and asked a government of their own. Lawless as they were, they
+wanted a real law, a law of Saxon right and justice.
+
+Men like Crockett, Fannin, Travers and Bowie were influenced half by
+political ambition and half by love of adventure when they moved across
+the plains of eastern Texas and took up their abode on the firing line
+of the Mexican border. If you seek a historic band of bad men, fighting
+men of the bitterest Baresark type, look at the immortal defenders of
+the Alamo. Some of them were, in the light of calm analysis, little
+better than guerrillas; but every man was a hero. They all had a chance
+to escape, to go out and join Sam Houston farther to the east; but they
+refused to a man, and, plying the border weapons as none but such as
+themselves might, they died, full of the glory of battle; not in ranks
+and shoulder to shoulder, with banners and music to cheer them, but each
+for himself and hand to hand with his enemy, a desperate fighting man.
+
+The early men of Texas for generations fought Mexicans and Indians in
+turn. The country was too vast for any system of law. Each man had
+learned to depend upon himself. Each cabin kept a rifle and pistol for
+each male old enough to bear them, and each boy, as he grew up, was
+skilled in weapons and used to the thought that the only arbitrament
+among men was that of weapons. Part of the population, appreciating the
+exemptions here to be found, was, without doubt, criminal; made up of
+men who had fled, for reasons of their own, from older regions. These in
+time required the attention of the law; and the armed bodies of
+hard-riding Texas rangers, a remedy born of necessity, appeared as the
+executives of the law.
+
+The cattle days saw the wild times of the border prolonged. The buffalo
+range caught its quota of hard riders and hard shooters. And always the
+apparently exhaustless empires of new and unsettled lands--an enormous,
+untracked empire of the wild--beckoned on and on; so that men in the
+most densely settled sections were very far apart, and so that the law
+as a guardian could not be depended upon. It was not to be wondered at
+that the name of Texas became the synonym for savagery. That was for a
+long time the wildest region within our national confines. Many men who
+attained fame as fighters along the Pecos and Rio Grande and Gila and
+Colorado came across the borders from Texas. Others slipped north into
+the Indian Nations, and left their mark there. Some went to the mines of
+the Rockies, or the cattle ranges from Montana to Arizona. Many stayed
+at home, and finished their eventful lives there in the usual
+fashion--killing now and again, then oftener, until at length they
+killed once too often and got hanged; or not often enough once, and so
+got shot.
+
+To undertake to give even the most superficial study to a field so vast
+as this would require a dozen times the space we may afford, and would
+lead us far into matters of history other than those intended. We can
+only point out that the men of the Lone Star state left their stamp as
+horsemen and weapon-bearers clear on to the north, and as far as the
+foot of the Arctic circle. Their language and their methods mark the
+entire cattle business of the plains from the Rio Grande to the
+Selkirks. Theirs was a great school for frontiersmen, and its graduates
+gave full account of themselves wherever they went. Among them were bad
+men, as bad as the worst of any land, and in numbers not capable of
+compass even in a broad estimate.
+
+Some citizens of Montgomery county, Texas, were not long ago sitting in
+a store of an evening, and they fell to counting up the homicides which
+had fallen under their notice in that county within recent memory. They
+counted up seventy-five authenticated cases, and could not claim
+comprehensiveness for their tally. Many a county of Texas could do as
+well or better, and there are many counties. It takes you two days to
+ride across Texas by railway. A review of the bad man field of Texas
+pauses for obvious reasons!
+
+So many bad men of Texas have attained reputation far wider than their
+state that it became a proverb upon the frontier that any man born on
+Texas soil would shoot, just as any horse born there would "buck." There
+is truth back of most proverbs, although to-day both horses and men of
+Texas are losing something of their erstwhile bronco character. That
+out of such conditions, out of this hardy and indomitable population,
+the great state could bring order and quiet so soon and so permanently
+over vast unsettled regions, is proof alike of the fundamental sternness
+and justness of the American character and the value of the American
+fighting man.
+
+Yet, though peace hath her victories not less than war, it is to be
+doubted whether in her own heart Texas is more proud of her statesmen
+and commercial kings than of her stalwart fighting men, bred to the use
+of arms. The beautiful city of San Antonio is to-day busy and
+prosperous; yet to-day you tread there ground which has been stained red
+over and over again. The names of Crockett, Milam, Travis, Bowie, endure
+where those of captains of industry are forgotten. Out of history such
+as this, covering a half century of border fighting, of frontier travel
+and merchandising, of cattle trade and railroad building, it is
+impossible--in view of the many competitors of equal claims--to select
+an example of bad eminence fit to bear the title of the leading bad man
+of Texas.
+
+There was one somewhat noted Texas character, however, whose life comes
+down to modern times, and hence is susceptible of fairly accurate
+review--a thing always desirable, though not often practical, for no
+history is more distorted, not to say more garbled, than that dealing
+with the somewhat mythical exploits of noted gun fighters. Ben Thompson,
+of Austin, killer of more than twenty men, and a very perfect exemplar
+of the creed of the six-shooter, will serve as instance good enough for
+a generic application. Thompson was not a hero. He did no deeds of war.
+He led no forlorn hope into the imminent deadly breach. His name is
+preserved in no history of his great commonwealth. He was in the opinion
+of certain peace officers, all that a citizen should not be. Yet in his
+way he reached distinction; and so striking was his life that even
+to-day he does not lack apologists, even as he never lacked friends.
+
+Ben Thompson was of English descent, and was born near Lockhart, Texas,
+according to general belief, though it is stated that he was born in
+Yorkshire, England. Later his home was in Austin, where he spent the
+greater part of his life, though roaming from place to place. Known as a
+bold and skillful gun man, he was looked on as good material for a
+hunter of bad men, and at the time of his death was marshal of police
+at Austin. In personal appearance Thompson looked the part of the
+typical gambler and gun fighter. His height was about five feet eight
+inches, and his figure was muscular and compact. His hair was dark and
+waving; his eyes gray. He was very neat in dress, and always took
+particular pains with his footwear, his small feet being always clad in
+well-fitting boots of light material, a common form of foppery in a land
+where other details of dress were apt to be carelessly regarded. He wore
+a dark mustache which, in his early years, he was wont to keep waxed to
+points. In speech he was quiet and unobtrusive, unless excited by drink.
+With the six-shooter he was a peerless shot, an absolute genius, none in
+all his wide surrounding claiming to be his superior; and he had a
+ferocity of disposition which grew with years until he had, as one of
+his friends put it, "a craving to kill people." Each killing seemed to
+make him desirous of another. He thus came to exercise that curious
+fascination which such characters have always commanded. Fear he did not
+know, or at least no test arising in his somewhat varied life ever
+caused him to show fear. He passed through life as a wild animal,
+ungoverned by the law, rejoicing in blood; yet withal he was held as a
+faithful friend and a good companion. To this day many men repel the
+accusation that he was bad, and maintain that each of his twenty
+killings was done in self-defense. The brutal phase of his nature was no
+doubt dominant, even although it was not always in evidence. He was
+usually spoken of as a "good fellow," and those who palliate or deny
+most of his wild deeds declare that local history has never been as fair
+to him as he deserved.
+
+Thompson's first killing was while he was a young man at New Orleans,
+and according to the story, arose out of his notions of chivalry. He was
+passing down the street in a public conveyance, in company of several
+young Creoles, who were going home from a dance in a somewhat
+exhilarated condition. One or two of the strangers made remarks to an
+unescorted girl, which Thompson construed to be offensive, and he took
+it upon himself to avenge the insult to womanhood. In the affray that
+followed he killed one of the young men. For this he was obliged to flee
+to old Mexico, taking one of the boats down the river. He returned
+presently to Galveston, where he set up as a gambler, and began to
+extend his reputation as a fighting man. Most of his encounters were
+over cards or drink or women, the history of many or most of the border
+killings.
+
+Thompson's list grew steadily, and by the time he was forty years of age
+he had a reputation far wider than his state. In all the main cities of
+Texas he was a figure more or less familiar, and always dreaded. His
+skill with his favorite weapon was a proverb in a state full of men
+skilled with weapons. Moreover, his disposition now began to grow more
+ugly, sullen and bloodthirsty. He needed small pretext to kill a man if,
+for the slightest cause, he took a dislike to him. To illustrate the
+ferocity of the man, and his readiness to provoke a quarrel, the
+following story is told of him:
+
+A gambler by the name of Jim Burdette was badly whipped by the
+proprietor of a variety show, Mark Wilson, who, after the fight, told
+Burdette that he had enough of men like him, who only came to his
+theater to raise trouble and interfere with his business, and that if
+either he or any of his gang ever again attempted to disturb his
+audiences that they would have him (Wilson) to deal with. The next day
+Ben Thompson, seated in a barber shop, heard about the row and said to
+a negro standing by: "Mack, d--n your nigger soul, you go down to that
+place this evening and when the house is full and everybody is seated,
+you just raise hell and we'll see what that ---- is made of." The
+program was carried out. The negro arose in the midst of the audience
+and delivered himself of a few blood-curdling yells. Instantly the
+proprietor came out of the place, but caught sight of Thompson, who had
+drawn a pair of guns and stood ready to kill Wilson. The latter was too
+quick for him, and quickly disappeared behind the scenery, after his
+shotgun. There was too much excitement that night, and the matter passed
+off without a killing. A few nights thereafter, Thompson procured some
+lamp-black, which he gave the gambler Burdette, with instructions to go
+to the theater, watch his chance, and dash the stuff in Wilson's face.
+This was done and when the ill-fated proprietor, who immediately went
+for his shotgun, came out with that weapon, Thompson fell to the ground,
+and the contents of the gun, badly fired at the hands of Wilson, his
+face full of lamp-black, passed over Thompson's head. Thompson then
+arose and filled Wilson full of holes, killing him instantly. The
+bartender, seeing his employer's life in danger, fired at Thompson
+wildly, and as Thompson turned on him he dodged behind the bar to
+receive his death wound through the counter and in his back. Thompson at
+the court of last resort managed to have a lot of testimony brought to
+bear, and, with a half dozen gamblers to swear to anything he needed, he
+was admitted to bail and later freed.
+
+He is said to have killed these two men for no reason in the world
+except to show that he could "run" a place where others had failed. A
+variation of the story is that a saloon keeper fired at Thompson as he
+was walking down the street in Austin, and missing him, sprang back
+behind the bar, Thompson shooting him through the head, through the bar
+front. Another man's life now meant little to him. He desired to be
+king, to be "chief," just as the leaders of the desperadoes in the
+mining regions of California and Montana sought to be "chief." It meant
+recognition of their courage, their skill, their willingness to take
+human life easily and carelessly and quickly, a singular ambition which
+has been so evidenced in no other part of the world than the American
+West. It is certain that the worst bad men all over Texas were afraid
+of Ben Thompson. He was "chief."
+
+Ben Thompson left the staid paths of life in civilized communities. He
+did not rob, and he did not commit theft or burglary or any highway
+crimes; yet toiling and spinning were not for him. He was, for the most
+part, a gambler, and after a while he ceased even to follow that calling
+as a means of livelihood. Forgetting the etiquette of his chosen
+profession, he insisted on winning no manner how and no matter what the
+game. He would go into a gambling resort in some town, and sit in at a
+game. If he won, very well. If he lost, he would become enraged, and
+usually ended by reaching out and raking in the money on the table, no
+matter what the decision of the cards. He bought drinks for the crowd
+with the money he thus took, and scattered it right and left, so that
+his acts found a certain sanction among those who had not been
+despoiled.
+
+To know what nerve it required to perform these acts of audacity, one
+must know something of the frontier life, which at no corner of the
+world was wilder and touchier than in the very part of the country where
+Thompson held forth. There were hundreds of men quick with the gun all
+about him, men of nerve, but he did not hesitate to take all manner of
+chances in that sort of population. The madness of the bad man was upon
+him. He must have known what alone could be his fate at last, but he
+went on, defying and courting his own destruction, as the finished
+desperado always does, under the strange creed of self-reliance which he
+established as his code of life. Thus, at a banquet of stockmen in
+Austin, and while the dinner was in progress, Thompson, alone, stampeded
+every man of them, and at that time nearly all stockmen were game. The
+fear of Thompson's pistol was such that no one would stand for a fight
+with him. Once Thompson went to the worst place in Texas, the town of
+Luling, where Rowdy Joe was running the toughest dance house in America.
+He ran all the bad men out of the place, confiscated what cash he needed
+from the gaming tables and raised trouble generally. He showed that he
+was "chief."
+
+In the early eighties, in the quiet, sleepy, bloody old town of San
+Antonio, there was a dance hall, gambling resort and vaudeville theater,
+in which the main proprietor was one Jack Harris, commonly known as
+Pegleg Harris. Thompson frequently patronized this place on his visits
+to San Antonio, and received treatment which left him with a grudge
+against Harris, whom he resolved to kill. He followed his man into the
+bar-room one day and killed Harris as he stood in the semi-darkness. It
+was only another case of "self-defense" for Thompson, who was well used
+to being cleared of criminal charges or left unaccused altogether; and
+no doubt Harris would have killed him if he could.
+
+After killing Harris, Thompson declared that he proposed to kill Harris'
+partners, Foster and Simms. He had an especial grudge against Billy
+Simms, then a young man not yet nineteen years of age, because, so it is
+stated, he fancied that Simms supplanted him in the affections of a
+woman in Austin; and he carried also his grudge against the gambling
+house, where Simms now was the manager. Every time Thompson got drunk,
+he declared his intention of killing Billy Simms, and as the latter was
+young and inexperienced, he trembled in his boots at this talk which
+seemed surely to spell his doom. Simms, to escape Thompson's wrath,
+removed to Chicago, and remained there for a time, but before long was
+summoned home to Austin, where his mother was very ill. Thompson knew
+of his presence in Austin, but with magnanimity declined to kill Simms
+while he was visiting his sick mother. "Wait till he goes over to
+Santone," he said, "then I'll step over and kill the little ----."
+Simms, presently called to San Antonio to settle some debt of Jack
+Harris' estate, of which as friend and partner of the widow he had been
+appointed administrator, went to the latter city with a heavy heart,
+supposing that he would never leave it alive. He was told there that
+Thompson had been threatening him many times; and Simms received many
+telegrams to that effect. Some say that Thompson himself telegraphed
+Simms that he was coming down that day to kill him. Certainly a friend
+of Simms on the same day wired him warning: "Party who wants to destroy
+you on train this day bound for San Antonio."
+
+Friends of Thompson deny that he made such threats, and insist that he
+went to San Antonio on a wholly peaceful errand. In any case, this
+guarded but perfectly plain message set Simms half distracted. He went
+to the city marshal and showed his telegram, asking the marshal for
+protection, but the latter told him nothing could be done until Thompson
+had committed some "overt act." The sheriff and all the other officers
+said the same thing, not caring to meet Thompson if they could avoid it.
+Simms later in telling his story would sob at the memory of his feeling
+of helplessness at that time. The law gave him no protection. He was
+obliged to take matters in his own hands. He went to a judge of the
+court, and asked him what he should do. The judge pondered for a time,
+and said: "Under the circumstances, I should advise a shotgun."
+
+Simms went to one of the faro dealers of the house, a man who was known
+as bad, and who never sat down to deal faro without a brace of big
+revolvers on the table; but this dealer advised him to go and "make
+friends with Thompson." He went to Foster, Harris' old partner, and laid
+the matter before him. Foster said, slowly, "Well, Billy, when he comes
+we'll do the best we can." Simms thought that he too was weakening.
+
+There was a big policeman, a Mexican by name of Coy, who was considered
+a brave man and a fighter, and Simms now went to him and asked for aid,
+saying that he expected trouble that night, and wanted Coy to do his
+duty. Coy did not become enthusiastic, though as a matter of fact
+neither he nor Foster made any attempt to leave the place. Simms turned
+away, feeling that his end was near. In desperation he got a shotgun,
+and for a time stationed himself near the top of the stair up which
+Thompson would probably come when entering the place. The theater was up
+one flight of stairs, and at the right was the customary bar, from which
+"ladies" in short skirts served drinks to the crowd during the variety
+performance, which was one of the attractions of the place.
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD CHISUM RANCH BELOW ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO]
+
+It was nervous work, waiting for the killer to come, and Simms could not
+stand it. He walked down the stairway, and took a turn around the block
+before he again ascended the stairs to the hall. Meantime, Ben Thompson,
+accompanied by another character, King Fisher, a man with several
+notches on his gun, had ascended the stairs, and had taken a seat on the
+right hand side and beyond the bar, in the row nearest the door. When
+Simms stepped to the foot of the stairs on his return, he met the
+barkeeper, who was livid with terror. He pointed trembling up the stair
+and whispered, "He's there!" Ben Thompson and King Fisher had as yet
+made no sort of demonstration. It is said that King Fisher had decoyed
+Thompson into the theater, knowing that a trap was laid to kill him. It
+is also declared that Thompson went in merely for amusement. A friend of
+the author, a New Mexican sheriff who happened to be in San Antonio, saw
+and talked with both men that afternoon. They were both quiet and sober
+then.
+
+Simms' heart was in his mouth, but he made up his mind to die game, if
+he had to die. Slowly he walked up the stairway. Such was Thompson's
+vigilance, that he quickly arose and advanced toward Simms, who stood at
+the top of the stairs petrified and unable to move a muscle. Before
+Simms could think, his partner, Foster, appeared on the scene, and as he
+stood up, Thompson saw him and walked toward him and said: "Hello,
+Foster, how are you?" Slowly and deliberately Foster spoke: "Ben, this
+world is not big enough for us both. You killed poor Jack Harris like a
+dog, and you didn't as much as give him a chance for his life. You and I
+can never be friends any more." Quick as a flash and with a face like a
+demon, Thompson drew his pistol and jammed it into Foster's mouth,
+cruelly tearing his lips and sending him reeling backward. While this
+was going on, Simms had retreated to the next step, and there drew his
+pistol, not having his shotgun in hand then. He stepped forward as he
+saw Foster reel from the blow Thompson gave him, and with sudden courage
+opened fire. His first shot must have taken effect, and perhaps it
+decided the conflict. Thompson's gun did not get into action. Simms kept
+on firing. Thompson reeled back against King Fisher, and the two were
+unable to fire. Meantime the big Mexican, Coy, showed up from somewhere,
+just as Foster had. Both Foster and Coy rushed in front of the line of
+fire of Simms' pistol; and then without doubt, Simms killed his own
+friend and preserver. Foster got his death wound in such position that
+Simms admitted he must have shot him. None the less Foster ran into
+Thompson as the latter reeled backwards upon Fisher, and, with the fury
+of a tiger, shoved his own pistol barrel into Thompson's mouth in turn,
+and fired twice, completing the work Simms had begun. The giant Coy
+hurled his bulk into the struggling mass now crowded into the corner of
+the room, and some say he held Ben Thompson's arms, though in the melee
+it was hard to tell what happened. He called out to Simms, "Don't mind
+me," meaning that Simms should keep on firing. "Kill the ---- of ----!"
+he cried. Coy no doubt was a factor in saving Simms' life, for one or
+the other of these two worst men in the Southwest would have got a man
+before he fell, had he been able to get his hands free in the
+struggling. Coy was shot in the leg, possibly by Simms, but did not
+drop. Simms took care of Coy to the end of his life, Coy dying but
+recently.
+
+One of the men engaged in this desperate fight says that Coy did not
+hold Thompson, and that at first no one was shot to the floor. Thompson
+was staggered by Simms' first shot, which prevented a quick return of
+fire. It was Foster who killed Thompson and very likely King Fisher, the
+latter being hemmed in in the corner with Thompson in front of him. Coy
+rushed into the two and handled them so roughly that they never got
+their guns into action so far as known.
+
+Leaving the fallen men at the rear of the theater, Simms now went down
+stairs, carrying Foster's pistol, with two chambers empty (the shots
+that killed Thompson) and his own gun. He saw Thompson's brother Bill
+coming at him. He raised the gun to kill him, when Phil Shardein, then
+city marshal, jumped on Thompson and shielded him with his body,
+calling out, "Don't shoot, Billy, I've got him." This saved Bill
+Thompson's life. Then several shots were heard upstairs, and upon
+investigation, it was found that Coy had emptied his pistol into the
+dead body of Thompson. He also shot Fisher, to "make sure the ---- were
+dead."
+
+Thus they died at last, two of the most notorious men of Texas, both
+with their boots on. There were no tears. Many told what they would or
+could have done had Ben Thompson threatened them. This closing act in
+the career of Ben Thompson came in the late spring of 1882. He was then
+about forty-three years of age.
+
+King Fisher, who met death at the same time with Thompson, was a good
+disciple of desperadoism. He was a dark-haired, slender young man from
+Goliad county--which county seems to have produced far more than its
+share of bad men. He had killed six men and stolen a great many horses
+in his time. Had he lived longer, he would have killed more. He was not
+of the caliber sufficient to undertake the running of a large city, but
+there was much relief felt over his death. He had many friends, of
+course, and some of these deny that he had any intention of making
+trouble when he went into the theater with Ben Thompson, just as friends
+of the latter accuse King Fisher of treachery. There are never lacking
+men who regard dead desperadoes as martyrs; and indeed it is usually the
+case that there are mixed circumstances and frequently extenuating ones,
+to be found in the history of any killer's life.
+
+Another Goliad county man well known around San Antonio was Alfred Y.
+Allee, who was a rancher a short distance back from the railway. Allee
+was decent when sober, but when drunk was very dangerous, and was
+recognized as bad and well worth watching. Liquor seemed to transform
+him and to make him a bloodthirsty fiend. He had killed several men, one
+or two under no provocation whatever and when they were defenseless,
+including a porter on a railway train. It was his habit to come to town
+and get drunk, then to invite every one to drink with him and take
+offense at any refusal. He liked to be "chief" of the drinking place
+which he honored with his presence. He once ordered a peaceful citizen
+of San Antonio, a friend of the writer, up to drink with him, and when
+the latter declined came near shooting him. The man took his drink,
+then slipped away and got his shotgun. Perhaps his second thought was
+wiser. "What's the use?" he argued with himself. "Somebody'll kill Allee
+before long anyhow."
+
+This came quite true, for within the week Allee had run his course. He
+dropped down to Laredo and began to "hurrah" that town also. The town
+marshal, Joe Bartelow, was a Mexican, but something of a killer himself,
+and he resolved to end the Allee disturbances, once for all. It is said
+that Allee was not armed when at length they met in a saloon, and it is
+said that Bartelow offered his hand in greeting. At once Bartelow threw
+his arm around Allee's neck, and with his free hand cut him to death
+with a knife. Whether justifiable or not, that was the fashion of the
+homicide.
+
+Any man who has killed more than twenty men is in most countries
+considered fit to qualify as bad. This test would include the little
+human tiger, Tumlinson, of South Texas, who was part of the time an
+officer of the law and part of the time an independent killer in Texas.
+He had many more than twenty men to his credit, it was said, and his
+Mexican wife, smilingly, always said that "Tumlinson never counted
+Mexicans." He was a genius with the revolver, and as good a rifle shot
+as would often be found. It made no difference to him whether or not a
+man was running, for part of his pistol practice was in shooting at a
+bottle swinging in the wind from the bough of a tree. Legend goes that
+Tumlinson killed his wife and then shot himself dead, taking many
+secrets with him. He was bad.
+
+Sam Bass was a noted outlaw and killer in West Texas, accustomed to ride
+into town and to take charge of things when he pleased. He had many
+thefts and robberies to his credit, and not a few murders. His finish
+was one not infrequent in that country. The citizens got wind of his
+coming one day, just before he rode into Round Rock for a little raid.
+The city marshal and several others opened fire on Bass and his party,
+and killed them to a man.
+
+It was of such stuff as this that most of the bad men and indeed many of
+the peace officers were composed, along a wide frontier in the early
+troublous days following the civil war, when all the border was a
+seething mass of armed men for whom the law had as yet gained no
+meaning. To tell the story of more individuals would be to depart from
+the purpose of this work. Were these men wrong, and were they wholly
+and unreservedly bad? Ignorance and bigotry will be the first to give
+the answer, the first to apply to them the standards of these later
+days.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XX
+
+Modern Bad Men--_Murder and Robbery as a Profession_--_The School of
+Guerrilla Warfare_--_Butcher Quantrell; the James Brothers; the Younger
+Brothers_.
+
+
+Outlawry of the early border, in days before any pretense at
+establishment of a system of law and government, and before the holding
+of property had assumed any very stable form, may have retained a
+certain glamour of romance. The loose gold of the mountains, the loose
+cattle of the plains, before society had fallen into any strict way of
+living, and while plenty seemed to exist for any and all, made a
+temptation easily accepted and easily excused. The ruffians of those
+early days had a largeness in their methods which gives some of them at
+least a color of interest. If any excuse may be offered for lawlessness,
+any palliation for acts committed without countenance of the law, that
+excuse and palliation may be pleaded for these men if for any. But for
+the man who is bad and mean as well, who kills for gain, and who adds
+cruelty and cunning to his acts instead of boldness and courage, little
+can be said. Such characters afford us horror, but it is horror
+unmingled with any manner of admiration.
+
+Yet, if we reconcile ourselves to tarry a moment with the cheap and
+gruesome, the brutal and ignorant side of mere crime, we shall be
+obliged to take into consideration some of the bloodiest characters ever
+known in our history; who operated well within the day of established
+law; who made a trade of robbery, and whose capital consisted of
+disregard for the life and property of others. That men like this should
+live for years at the very door of large cities, in an old settled
+country, and known familiarly in their actual character to thousands of
+good citizens, is a strange commentary on the American character; yet
+such are the facts.
+
+It has been shown that a widely extended war always has the effect of
+cheapening human life in and out of the ranks of the fighting armies.
+The early wars of England, in the days of the longbow and buckler,
+brought on her palmiest days of cutpurses and cutthroats. The days
+following our own civil war were fearful ones for the entire country
+from Montana to Texas; and nowhere more so than along the dividing line
+between North and South, where feeling far bitterer than soldierly
+antagonism marked a large population on both sides of that contest. We
+may further restrict the field by saying that nowhere on any border was
+animosity so fierce as in western Missouri and eastern Kansas, where
+jayhawker and border ruffian waged a guerrilla war for years before the
+nation was arrayed against itself in ordered ranks. If mere blood be
+matter of our record here, assuredly, is a field of interest. The deeds
+of Lane and Brown, of Quantrell and Hamilton, are not surpassed in
+terror in the history of any land. Osceola, Marais du Cygne,
+Lawrence--these names warrant a shudder even to-day.
+
+This locality--say that part of Kansas and Missouri near the towns of
+Independence and Westport, and more especially the counties of Jackson
+and Clay in the latter state--was always turbulent, and had reason to
+be. Here was the halting place of the westbound civilization, at the
+edge of the plains, at the line long dividing the whites from the
+Indians. Here settled, like the gravel along the cleats of a sluice,
+the daring men who had pushed west from Kentucky, Tennessee, lower Ohio,
+eastern Missouri--the Boones, Carsons, Crocketts, and Kentons of their
+day. Here came the Mormons to found their towns, and later to meet the
+armed resistance which drove them across the plains. Here, at these very
+towns, was the outfitting place and departing point of the caravans of
+the early Santa Fe trade; here the Oregon Trail left for the far
+Northwest; and here the Forty-niners paused a moment in their mad rush
+to the golden coast of the Pacific. Here, too, adding the bitterness of
+fanaticism to the courage of the frontier, came the bold men of the
+North who insisted that Kansas should be free for the expansion of the
+northern population and institutions.
+
+This corner of Missouri-Kansas was a focus of recklessness and daring
+for more than a whole generation. The children born there had an
+inheritance of indifference to death such as has been surpassed nowhere
+in our frontier unless that were in the bloody Southwest. The men of
+this country, at the outbreak of the civil war, made as high an average
+in desperate fighting as any that ever lived. Too restless to fight
+under the ensign of any but their own ilk, they set up a banner of their
+own. The black flags of Quantrell and of Lane, of border ruffian and
+jayhawker, were guidons under which quarter was unknown, and mercy a
+forgotten thing. Warfare became murder, and murder became assassination.
+Ambushing, surprise, pillage and arson went with murder; and women and
+children were killed as well as fighting men. Is it wonder that in such
+a school there grew up those figures which a certain class of writers
+have been wont to call bandit kings; the bank robbers and train robbers
+of modern days, the James and Younger type of bad men?
+
+The most notorious of these border fighters was the bloody leader,
+Charles William Quantrell, leader at the sacking of Lawrence, and as
+dangerous a partisan leader as ever threw leg into saddle. He was born
+in Hagerstown, Maryland, July 20, 1836, and as a boy lived for a time in
+the Ohio city of Cleveland. At twenty years of age, he joined his
+brother for a trip to California, _via_ the great plains. This was in
+1856, and Kansas was full of Free Soilers, whose political principles
+were not always untempered by a large-minded willingness to rob. A
+party of these men surprised the Quantrell party on the Cottonwood
+river, and killed the older brother. Charles William Quantrell swore an
+undying revenge; and he kept his oath.
+
+It is not necessary to mention in detail the deeds of this border
+leader. They might have had commendation for their daring had it not
+been for their brutality and treachery. Quantrell had a band of sworn
+men, held under solemn oath to stand by each other and to keep their
+secrets. These men were well armed and well mounted, were all fearless
+and all good shots, the revolver being their especial arm, as it was of
+Mosby's men in the civil war. The tactics of this force comprised
+surprise, ambush, and a determined rush, in turn; and time and again
+they defeated Federal forces many times their number, being thoroughly
+well acquainted with the country, and scrupling at nothing in the way of
+treachery, just as they considered little the odds against which they
+fought. Their victims were sometimes paroled, but not often, and a
+massacre usually followed a defeat--almost invariably so if the number
+of prisoners was small.
+
+Cold-blooded and unhesitating murder was part of their everyday life.
+Thus Jesse James, on the march to the Lawrence massacre, had in charge
+three men, one of them an old man, whom they took along as guides from
+the little town of Aubrey, Kansas. They used these men until they found
+themselves within a few miles of Lawrence, and then, as is alleged,
+members of the band took them aside and killed them, the old man begging
+for his life and pleading that he never had done them any wrong. His
+murderers were no more than boys. This act may have been that of bad
+men, but not of the sort of bad men that leaves us any sort of respect,
+such as that which may be given Wild Bill, even Billy the Kid, or any of
+a dozen other big-minded desperadoes.
+
+This assassination was but one of scores or hundreds. A neighbor
+suspected of Federal sympathies was visited in the night and shot or
+hanged, his property destroyed, his family killed. The climax of the
+Lawrence massacre was simply the working out of principles of blood and
+revenge. In that fight, or, more properly, that massacre, women and
+children went down as well as men. The James boys were Quantrell riders,
+Jesse a new recruit, and that day they maintained that they had killed
+sixty-five persons between them, and wounded twenty more! What was the
+total record of these two men alone in all this period of guerrilla
+fighting? It cannot be told. Probably they themselves could not
+remember. The four Younger boys had records almost or quite as bad.
+
+There, indeed, was a border soaked in blood, a country torn with
+intestinal warfare. Quantrell was beaten now and then, meeting fighting
+men in blue or in jeans, as well as leading fighting men; and at times
+he was forced to disband his men, later to recruit again, and to go on
+with his marauding up and down the border. His career attracted the
+attention of leaders on both sides of the opposing armies, and at one
+time it was nearly planned that Confederates should join the Unionists
+and make common cause against these guerrillas, who had made the name of
+Missouri one of reproach and contempt. The matter finally adjusted
+itself by the death of Quantrell in a fight at Smiley, Kentucky, in
+January, 1865.
+
+With a birth and training such as this, what could be expected for the
+surviving Quantrell men? They scattered over all the frontier, from
+Texas to Minnesota, and most of them lived in terror of their lives
+thereafter, with the name of Quantrell as a term of loathing attached to
+them where their earlier record was known. Many and many a border
+killing years later and far removed in locality arose from the
+implacable hatred descended from those days.
+
+As for the James boys, the Younger boys, what could they do? The days of
+war were gone. There were no longer any armed banners arrayed one
+against the other. The soldiers who had fought bravely and openly on
+both sides had laid down their arms and fraternized. The Union grew,
+strong and indissoluble. Men settled down to farming, to artisanship, to
+merchandising, and their wounds were healed. Amnesty was extended to
+those who wished it and deserved it. These men could have found a living
+easy to them, for the farming lands still lay rich and ready for them.
+But they did not want this life of toil. They preferred the ways of
+robbery and blood in which they had begun. They cherished animosity now,
+not against the Federals, but against mankind. The social world was
+their field of harvest; and they reaped it, weapon in hand.
+
+The James family originally came from Kentucky, where Frank was born,
+in Scott county, in 1846. The father, Robert James, was a Baptist
+minister of the Gospel. He removed to Clay county, Missouri, in 1849,
+and Jesse was born there in 1850. Reverend Robert James left for
+California in 1851 and never returned. The mother, a woman of great
+strength of character, later married a Doctor Samuels. She was much
+embittered by the persecution of her family, as she considered it. She
+herself lost an arm in an attack by detectives upon her home, in which a
+young son was killed. The family had many friends and confederates
+throughout the country; else the James boys must have found an end long
+before they were brought to justice.
+
+From precisely the same surroundings came the Younger boys, Thomas
+Coleman, or "Cole," Younger, and his brothers, John, Bruce, James, and
+Robert. Their father was Henry W. Younger, who settled in Jackson
+county, Missouri, in 1825, and was known as a man of ability and worth.
+For eight years he was county judge, and was twice elected to the state
+legislature. He had fourteen children, of whom five certainly were bad.
+At one time he owned large bodies of land, and he was a prosperous
+merchant in Harrisonville for some time. Cole Younger was born January
+15, 1844, John in 1846, Bruce in 1848, James in 1850, and Bob in 1853.
+As these boys grew old enough, they joined the Quantrell bands, and
+their careers were precisely the same as those of the James boys. The
+cause of their choice of sides was the same. Jennison, the Kansas
+jayhawker leader, in one of his raids into Missouri, burned the houses
+of Younger and confiscated the horses in his livery stables. After that
+the boys of the family swore revenge.
+
+At the close of the war, the Younger and James boys worked together very
+often, and were leaders of a band which had a cave in Clay county and
+numberless farm houses where they could expect shelter in need. With
+them, part of the time, were George and Ollie Shepherd; other members of
+their band were Bud Singleton, Bob Moore, Clel Miller and his brother,
+Arthur McCoy; others who came and went from time to time were regularly
+connected with the bigger operations. It would be wearisome to recount
+the long list of crimes these men committed for ten or fifteen years
+after the war. They certainly brought notoriety to their country. They
+had the entire press of America reproaching the State of Missouri; they
+had the governors of that state and two or three others at their wits'
+end; they had the best forces of the large city detective agencies
+completely baffled. They killed two detectives--one of whom, however,
+killed John Younger before he died--and executed another in cold blood
+under circumstances of repellant brutality. They raided over Missouri,
+Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, even as far east as West Virginia, as far
+north as Minnesota, as far south as Texas and even old Mexico. They
+looted dozens of banks, and held up as many railway passenger trains and
+as many stage coaches and travelers as they liked. The James boys alone
+are known to have taken in their robberies $275,000, and, including the
+unlawful gains of their colleagues, the Youngers, no doubt they could
+have accounted for over half a million dollars. They laughed at the law,
+defied the state and county governments, and rode as they liked, here,
+there, and everywhere, until the name of law in the West was a mockery.
+If magnitude in crime be claim to distinction, they might ask the title,
+for surely their exploits were unrivaled, and perhaps cannot again be
+equaled. And they did all of these unbelievable things in the heart of
+the Mississippi valley, in a country thickly settled, in the face of a
+long reputation for criminal deeds, and in a country fully warned
+against them! Surely, it seems sometimes that American law is weak.
+
+It was much the same story in all the long list of robberies of small
+country banks. A member of the gang would locate the bank and get an
+idea of the interior arrangements. Two or three of the gang would step
+in and ask to have a bill changed; then they would cover the cashier
+with revolvers and force him to open the safe. If he resisted, he was
+killed; sometimes killed no matter what he did, as was cashier Sheets in
+the Gallatin bank robbery. The guard outside kept the citizens terrified
+until the booty was secured; then flight on good horses followed. After
+that ensued the frantic and unorganized pursuit by citizens and
+officers, possibly another killing or two _en route_, and a return to
+their lurking place in Clay county, Missouri, where they never had any
+difficulty in proving all the _alibis_ they needed. None of these men
+ever confessed to a full list of these robberies, and, even years later,
+they all denied complicity; but the facts are too well known to warrant
+any attention to their denials, founded upon a very natural reticence.
+Of course, their safety lay in the sympathy of a large number of
+neighbors of something the same kidney; and fear of retaliation supplied
+the only remaining motive needed to enforce secrecy.
+
+Some of the most noted bank robberies in which the above mentioned men,
+or some of them, were known to have been engaged were as follows: The
+Clay County Savings Association, of Liberty, Missouri, February 14,
+1866, in which a little boy by name of Wymore was shot to pieces because
+he obeyed the orders of the bank cashier and gave the alarm; the bank of
+Alexander Mitchell & Co., Lexington, Missouri, October 30, 1860; the
+McLain Bank, of Savannah, Missouri, March 2, 1867, in which Judge McLain
+was shot and nearly killed; the Hughes & Mason Bank, of Richmond,
+Missouri, May 23, 1867, and the later attack on the jail, in which Mayor
+Shaw, Sheriff J. B. Griffin, and his brave fifteen-year-old boy were all
+killed; the bank of Russellville, Kentucky, March 20, 1868, in which
+cashier Long was badly beaten; the Daviess County Savings Bank, of
+Gallatin, Missouri, December 7, 1869, in which cashier John Sheets was
+brutally killed; the bank of Obocock Brothers, Corydon, Iowa, June 3,
+1871, in which forty thousand dollars was taken, although no one was
+killed; the Deposit Bank, of Columbia, Missouri, April 29, 1872, in
+which cashier R. A. C. Martin was killed; the Savings Association, of
+Ste. Genevieve, Missouri; the Bank of Huntington, West Virginia,
+September 1, 1875, in which one of the bandits, McDaniels, was killed;
+the Bank of Northfield, Minnesota, September 7, 1876, in which cashier
+J. L. Haywood was killed, A. E. Bunker wounded, and several of the
+bandits killed and captured as later described.
+
+These same men or some of them also robbed a stage coach now and then;
+near Hot Springs, Arkansas, for example, January 15, 1874, where they
+picked up four thousand dollars, and included ex-Governor Burbank, of
+Dakota, among their victims, taking from him alone fifteen hundred
+dollars; the San Antonio-Austin coach, in Texas, May 12, 1875, in which
+John Breckenridge, president of the First National Bank of San Antonio,
+was relieved of one thousand dollars; and the Mammoth Cave, Kentucky,
+stage, September 3, 1880, where they took nearly two thousand dollars in
+cash and jewelry from passengers of distinction.
+
+The most daring of their work, however, and that which brought them into
+contact with the United States government for tampering with the mails,
+was their repeated robbery of railway mail trains, which became a matter
+of simplicity and certainty in their hands. To flag a train or to stop
+it with an obstruction; or to get aboard and mingle with the train crew,
+then to halt the train, kill any one who opposed them, and force the
+opening of the express agent's safe, became a matter of routine with
+them in time, and the amount of cash they thus obtained was staggering
+in the total. The most noted train robberies in which members of the
+James-Younger bands were engaged were the Rock Island train robbery near
+Council Bluffs, Iowa, July 21, 1873, in which engineer Rafferty was
+killed in the wreck, and but small booty secured; the Gad's Hill,
+Missouri, robbery of the Iron Mountain train, January 28, 1874, in which
+about five thousand dollars was secured from the express agent, mail
+bags and passengers; the Kansas-Pacific train robbery near Muncie,
+Kansas, December 12, 1874, in which they secured more than fifty-five
+thousand dollars in cash and gold dust, with much jewelry; the
+Missouri-Pacific train robbery at Rocky Cut, July 7, 1876, where they
+held the train for an hour and a quarter and secured about fifteen
+thousand dollars in all; the robbery of the Chicago & Alton train near
+Glendale, Missouri, October 7, 1879, in which the James boys' gang
+secured between thirty-five and fifty thousand dollars in currency; the
+robbery of the Rock Island train near Winston, Missouri, July 15, 1881,
+by the James boys' gang, in which conductor Westfall was killed,
+messenger Murray badly beaten, and a passenger named MacMillan killed,
+little booty being obtained; the Blue Cut robbery of the Alton train,
+September 7, 1881, in which the James boys and eight others searched
+every passenger and took away a two-bushel sack full of cash, watches,
+and jewelry, beating the express messenger badly because they got so
+little from the safe. This last robbery caused the resolution of
+Governor Crittenden, of Missouri, to take the bandits dead or alive, a
+reward of thirty thousand dollars being arranged by different railways
+and express companies, a price of ten thousand dollars each being put
+on the heads of Frank and Jesse James.
+
+Outside of this long list of the bandit gang's deeds of outlawry, they
+were continually in smaller undertakings of a similar nature. Once they
+took away ten thousand dollars in cash at the box office of the Kansas
+City Fair, this happening September 26, 1872, in a crowded city, with
+all the modern machinery of the law to guard its citizens. Many acts at
+widely separated parts of the country were accredited to the Younger or
+the James boys, and although they cannot have been guilty of all of
+them, and, although many of the adventures accredited to them in Texas,
+Mexico, California, the Indian Nations, etc., bear earmarks of
+apocryphal origin, there is no doubt that for twenty years after the
+close of the civil war they made a living in this way, their gang being
+made up of perhaps a score of different men in all, and usually
+consisting of about six to ten men, according to the size of the
+undertaking on hand.
+
+Meantime, all these years, the list of homicides for each of them was
+growing. Jesse James killed three men out of six who attacked his house
+one night, and not long after Frank and he are alleged to have killed
+six men in a gambling fight in California. John and Jim Younger killed
+the Pinkerton detectives Lull and Daniels, John being himself killed at
+that time by Daniels. A little later, Frank and Jesse James and Clel
+Miller killed detective Wicher, of the same agency, torturing him for
+some time before his death in the attempt to make him divulge the
+Pinkerton plans. The James boys killed Daniel Askew in revenge; and
+Jesse James and Jim Anderson killed Ike Flannery for motives of robbery.
+This last set the gang into hostile camps, for Flannery was a nephew of
+George Shepherd. Shepherd later killed Anderson in Texas for his share
+in that act; he also shot Jesse James and for a long time supposed he
+had killed him.
+
+The full record of these outlaws will never be known. Their career came
+to an end soon after the heavy rewards were put upon their heads, and it
+came in the usual way, through treachery. Allured by the prospect of
+gaining ten thousand dollars, two cousins of Jesse James, Bob and
+Charlie Ford, pretending to join his gang for another robbery, became
+members of Jesse James' household while he was living _incognito_ as
+Thomas Howard. On the morning of April 3, 1882, Bob Ford, a mere boy,
+not yet twenty years of age, stepped behind Jesse James as he was
+standing on a chair dusting off a picture frame, and, firing at close
+range, shot him through the head and killed him. Bob Ford never got much
+respect for his act, and his money was soon gone. He himself was killed
+in February, 1892, at Creede, Colorado, by a man named Kelly.
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD FRITZ RANCH]
+
+[Illustration: A BORDER FORTRESS]
+
+Jesse James was about five feet ten inches in height, and weighed about
+one hundred and sixty-five pounds. His hair and eyes were brown. He had,
+during his life, been shot twice through the lungs, once through the
+leg, and had lost a finger of the left hand from a bullet wound. Frank
+James was slighter than his brother, with light hair and blue eyes, and
+a ragged, reddish mustache. Frank surrendered to Governor Crittenden
+himself at Jefferson City, in October, 1882, taking off his revolvers
+and saying that no man had touched them but himself since 1861. He was
+sentenced to the penitentiary for life, but later pardoned, as he was
+thought to be dying of consumption. At this writing, he is still alive,
+somewhat old and bent now, but leading a quiet and steady life, and
+showing no disposition to return to his old ways. He is sometimes seen
+around the race tracks, where he does but little talking. Frank James
+has had many apologists, and his life should be considered in connection
+with the environments in which he grew up. He killed many men, but he
+was never as cold and cruel as Jesse, and of the two he was the braver
+man, men say who knew them both. He never was known to back down under
+any circumstances.
+
+The fate of the Younger boys was much mingled with that of the James
+boys, but the end of the careers of the former came in more dramatic
+fashion. The wonder is that both parties should have clung together so
+long, for it is certain that Cole Younger once intended to kill Jesse
+James, and one night he came near killing George Shepherd through
+malicious statements Jesse James had made to him about the latter.
+Shepherd met Cole at the house of a friend named Hudspeth, in Jackson
+county, and their host put them in the same bed that night for want of
+better accommodations. "After we lay down," said Shepherd later, in
+describing this, "I saw Cole reach up under his pillow and draw out a
+pistol, which he put beside him under the cover. Not to be taken
+unawares, I at once grasped my own pistol and shoved it down under the
+covers beside me. Were it to save my life, I couldn't tell what reason
+Cole had for becoming my enemy. We talked very little, but just lay
+there watching each other. He was behind and I on the front side of the
+bed, and during the entire night we looked into each other's eyes and
+never moved. It was the most wretched night I ever passed in my life."
+So much may at times be the price of being "bad." By good fortune, they
+did not kill each other, and the next day Cole told Shepherd that he had
+expected him to shoot on sight, as Jesse James had said he would.
+Explanations then followed. It nearly came to a collision between Cole
+Younger and Jesse James later, for Cole challenged him to fight, and it
+was only with difficulty that their friends accommodated the matter.
+
+The history of the Younger boys is tragic all the way through. Their
+father was assassinated, their mother was forced to set fire to her own
+house and destroy it under penalty of death; three sisters were arrested
+and confined in a barracks at Kansas City, which during a high wind fell
+in, killed two of the girls and crippled the other. John Younger was a
+murderer at the age of fourteen, and how many times Cole Younger was a
+murderer, with or without his wish, will never be known. He was shot
+three times in one fight in guerrilla days, and probably few bad men
+ever carried off more lead than he.
+
+The story of the Northfield bank robbery in Minnesota, which ended so
+disastrously to the bandits who undertook it, is interesting as showing
+what brute courage, and, indeed, what fidelity and fortitude may at
+times be shown by dangerous specimens of bad men. The purpose of the
+robbery was criminal, its carrying out was attended with murder, and the
+revenge for it came sharp and swift. In all the annals of desperadoes,
+there is not a battle more striking than this which occurred in a sleepy
+and contented little village in the quiet northern farming country,
+where no one for a moment dreamed that the bandits of the rumored bloody
+lands along the Missouri would ever trouble themselves to come. The
+events immediately connected with this tragedy, the result of which was
+the ending of the Younger gang, were as hereinafter described.
+
+Bill Chadwell, alias Styles, a member of the James boys gang, had
+formerly lived in Minnesota. He drew a pleasing picture of the wealth
+of that country, and the ease with which it could be obtained by bandit
+methods. Cole Younger was opposed to going so far from home, but was
+overruled. He finally joined the others--Frank and Jesse James, Clel
+Miller, Jim and Bob Younger, Charlie Pitts and Chadwell. They went to
+Minnesota by rail, and, after looking over the country, purchased good
+horses, and prepared to raid the little town of Northfield, in Rice
+county. They carried their enterprise into effect on September 7, 1876,
+using methods with which earlier experience had made them familiar. They
+rode into the middle of the town and opened fire, ordering every one off
+the streets. Jesse James, Charlie Pitts and Bob Younger entered the
+bank, where they found cashier J. L. Haywood, with two clerks, Frank
+Wilcox and A. E. Bunker. Bunker started to run, and Bob Younger shot him
+through the shoulder. They ordered Haywood to open the safe, but he
+bluntly refused, even though they slightly cut him in the throat to
+enforce obedience. Firing now began from the citizens on the street, and
+the bandits in the bank hurried in their work, contenting themselves
+with such loose cash as they found in the drawers and on the counter.
+As they started to leave the bank, Haywood made a motion toward a drawer
+as if to find a weapon. Jesse James turned and shot him through the
+head, killing him instantly. These three of the bandits then sprang out
+into the street. They were met by the fire of Doctor Wheeler and several
+other citizens, Hide, Stacey, Manning and Bates. Doctor Wheeler was
+across the street in an upstairs room, and as Bill Chadwell undertook to
+mount his horse, Wheeler fired and shot him dead. Manning fired at Clel
+Miller, who had mounted, and shot him from his horse. Cole Younger was
+by this time ready to retreat, but he rode up to Miller, and removed
+from his body his belt and pistols. Manning fired again, and killed the
+horse behind which Bob Younger was hiding, and an instant later a shot
+from Wheeler struck Bob in the right elbow. Although this arm was
+disabled Bob shifted his pistol to his left hand and fired at Bates,
+cutting a furrow through his cheek, but not killing him. About this time
+a Norwegian by the name of Gustavson appeared on the street, and not
+halting at the order to do so, he was shot through the head by one of
+the bandits, receiving a wound from which he died a few days later. The
+gang then began to scatter and retreat. Jim Younger was on foot and was
+wounded. Cole rode back up the street, and took the wounded man on his
+horse behind him. The entire party then rode out of town to the west,
+not one of them escaping without severe wounds.
+
+As soon as the bandits had departed, news was sent by telegraph,
+notifying the surrounding country of the robbery. Sheriffs, policemen
+and detectives rallied in such numbers that the robbers were hard put to
+it to escape alive. A state reward of $1,000 for each was published, and
+all lower Minnesota organized itself into a determined man hunt. The
+gang undertook to get over the Iowa line, and they managed to keep away
+from their pursuers until the morning of the 13th, a week after the
+robbery. The six survivors were surrounded on that day in a strip of
+timber. Frank and Jesse James broke through, riding the same horse. They
+were fired upon, a bullet striking Frank James in the right knee, and
+passing through into Jesse's right thigh. None the less, the two got
+away, stole a horse apiece that night, and passed on to the Southwest.
+They rode bareback, and now and again enforced a horse trade with a
+farmer or livery-stable man. They got down near Sioux Falls, and there
+met Doctor Mosher, whom they compelled to dress their wounds, and to
+furnish them horses and clothing. Later on their horses gave out, and
+they hired a wagon and kept on. Their escape seems incomprehensible, yet
+it is the case that they got quite clear, finally reaching Missouri.
+
+Of the other bandits there were left Cole, Jim and Bob Younger and
+Charlie Pitts; and after these a large number of citizens followed
+close. In spite of the determined pursuit, they kept out of reach for
+another week. On the morning of September 21st, two weeks after the
+robbery, they were located in the woods along the Watonwan river, not
+far from Madelia. Sheriff Glispin hurriedly got together a posse and
+surrounded them in a patch of timber not over five acres in extent. In a
+short time more than one hundred and fifty men were about this cover;
+but although they kept up firing, they could not drive out the concealed
+bandits. Sheriff Glispin called for volunteers; and with Colonel Vaught,
+Ben Rice, George Bradford, James Severson, Charles Pomeroy and Captain
+Murphy moved into the cover. As they advanced, Charlie Pitts sprang out
+from the brush, and fired point blank at Glispin. At the same instant
+the latter also fired and shot Pitts, who ran a short distance and fell
+dead. Then Cole, Bob and Jim Younger stood up and opened fire as best
+they could, all of the men of the storming party returning their fire.
+Murphy was struck in the body by a bullet, and his life was saved by his
+pipe, which he carried in his vest pocket. Another member of the posse
+had his watch blown to pieces by a bullet. The Younger boys gave back a
+little, but this brought them within sight of those surrounding the
+thicket, so they retreated again close to the line of the volunteers.
+Cole and Jim Younger were now badly shot. Bob, with his broken right
+arm, stood his ground, the only one able to continue the fight, and kept
+his revolver going with his left hand. The others handed him their
+revolvers after his own was empty. The firing from the posse still
+continued, and at last Bob called out to them to stop, as his brothers
+were all shot to pieces. He threw down his pistol, and walked forward to
+the sheriff, to whom he surrendered. Bob always spoke with respect of
+Sheriff Glispin both as a fighter and as a peace officer. One of the
+farmers drew up his gun to kill Bob after he had surrendered, but
+Glispin told him to drop his gun or he would kill him.
+
+It is doubtful if any set of men ever showed more determination and more
+ability to stand punishment than these misled outlaws. Bob Younger was
+hurt less than any of the others. His arm had been broken at Northfield
+two weeks before, but he was wounded but once, slightly in the body, out
+of all the shots fired at him while in the thicket. Cole Younger had a
+rifle bullet in the right cheek, which paralyzed his right eye. He had
+received a .45 revolver bullet through the body, and also had been shot
+through the thigh at Northfield. He received eleven different wounds in
+the fight, or thirteen bad wounds in all, enough to have killed a half
+dozen men. Jim's case seemed even worse, for he had in his body eight
+buckshot and a rifle bullet. He had been shot through the shoulder at
+Northfield, and nearly half his lower jaw had been carried away by a
+heavy bullet, a wound which caused him intense suffering. Bob was the
+only one able to stand on his feet.
+
+Of the two men killed in town, Clel Miller and Bill Chadwell, the former
+had a long record in bank robberies; the latter, guide in the ill-fated
+expedition to Minnesota, was a horse thief of considerable note at one
+time in lower Minnesota.
+
+The prisoners were placed in jail at Faribault, the county seat of Rice
+county, and in a short time the Grand Jury returned true bills against
+them, charging them with murder and robbery. Court convened November
+7th, Judge Lord being on the bench. All of the prisoners pleaded guilty,
+and the order of the court was that each should be confined in the state
+penitentiary for the period of his natural life.
+
+The later fate of the Younger boys may be read in the succinct records
+of the Minnesota State Prison at Stillwater:
+
+     "_Thos. Coleman Younger_, sentenced Nov. 20, 1876, from Rice county
+     under a life sentence for the crime of Murder in the first degree.
+     Paroled July 14, 1901. Pardoned Feb. 4, 1903, on condition that he
+     leave the State of Minnesota, and that he never exhibit himself in
+     public in any way.
+
+     "_James Younger_, sentenced Nov. 20, 1876, from Rice county under a
+     life sentence for the crime of Murder in the first degree. Paroled
+     July 13, 1901. Shot himself with a revolver in the city of St.
+     Paul, Minn., and died at once from the wound inflicted on Oct. 19,
+     1902.
+
+     "_Robt. Younger_, sentenced Nov. 20, 1876, from Rice county under a
+     life sentence for the crime of Murder in the first degree. He died
+     Sept. 16, 1889, of phthisis."
+
+The James boys almost miraculously escaped, traveled clear across the
+State of Iowa and got back to their old haunts. They did not stop, but
+kept on going until they got to Mexico, where they remained for some
+time. They did not take their warning, however, and some of their most
+desperate train robberies were committed long after the Younger boys
+were in the penitentiary.
+
+In view of the bloody careers of all these men, it is to be said that
+the law has been singularly lenient with them. Yet the Northfield
+incident was conclusive, and was the worst setback ever received by any
+gang of bad men; unless, perhaps, that was the defeat of the Dalton gang
+at Coffeyville, Kansas, some years later, the story of which is given in
+the following chapter.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXI
+
+Bad Men of the Indian Nations--_A Hotbed of Desperadoes_--_Reasons for
+Bad Men in the Indian Nations_--_The Dalton Boys_--_The Most Desperate
+Street Fight of the West_.
+
+
+What is true for Texas, in the record of desperadoism, is equally
+applicable to the country adjoining Texas upon the north, long known
+under the general title of the Indian Nations; although it is now
+rapidly being divided and allotted under the increasing demands of an
+ever-advancing civilization.
+
+The great breeding ground of outlaws has ever been along the line of
+demarcation between the savage and the civilized. Here in the Indian
+country, as though in a hotbed especially contrived, the desperado has
+flourished for generations. The Indians themselves retained much their
+old savage standards after they had been placed in this supposedly
+perpetual haven of refuge by the government. They have been followed,
+ever since the first movement of the tribes into these reservations, by
+numbers of unscrupulous whites such as hang on the outskirts of the
+settlements and rebel at the requirements of civilization. Many white
+men of certain type married among the Indians, and the half-breed is
+reputed as a product inheriting the bad traits of both races and the
+good ones of neither--a sweeping statement not always wholly true. Among
+these also was a large infusion of negro blood, emanating from the
+slaves brought in by the Cherokees, and added to later by negroes moving
+in and marrying among the tribes. These mixed bloods seem to have been
+little disposed toward the ways of law and order. Moreover, the system
+of law was here, of course, altogether different from that of the
+States. The freedom from restraint, the exemption from law, which always
+marked the border, here found their last abiding place. The Indians were
+not adherents to the white man's creed, save as to the worst features,
+and they kept their own creed of blood. No man will ever know how many
+murders have been committed in these fair and pleasant savannahs, among
+these rough hills or upon these rolling grassy plains from the time
+William Clark, the "Red Head Chief," began the government work of
+settling the tribes in these lands, then supposed to be far beyond the
+possible demands of the white population of America.
+
+Life could be lived here with small exertion. The easy gifts of the soil
+and the chase, coupled with the easy gifts of the government, unsettled
+the minds of all from those habits of steady industry and thrift which
+go with the observance of the law. If one coveted his neighbor's
+possessions, the ready arbitrament of firearms told whose were the
+spoils. Human life has been cheap here for more than half a hundred
+years; and this condition has endured directly up to and into the days
+of white civilization. The writer remembers very well that in his
+hunting expeditions of twenty years ago it was always held dangerous to
+go into the Nations; and this was true whether parties went in across
+the Neutral Strip, or farther east among the Osages or the Creeks. The
+country below Coffeyville was wild and remote as we saw it then,
+although now it is settling up, is traversed by railroads, and is slowly
+passing into the hands of white men in severalty, as fast as the
+negroes release their lands, or as fast as the government allows the
+Indians to give individual titles. In those days it was a matter of
+small concern if a traveler never returned from a journey among the
+timber clad mountains, or the black jack thickets along the rivers; and
+many was the murder committed thereabouts that never came to light.
+
+In and around the Indian Nations there have also always been refugees
+from the upper frontier or from Texas or Arkansas. The country was long
+the natural haven of the lawless, as it has long been the designated
+home of a wild population. In this region the creed has been much the
+same even after the wild ethics of the cow men yielded to the scarcely
+more lawful methods of the land boomer.
+
+Each man in the older days had his own notion of personal conduct, as
+each had his own opinions about the sacredness of property. It was
+natural that train robbing and bank looting should become recognized
+industries when the railroads and towns came into this fertile region,
+so long left sacred to the chase. The gangs of such men as the Cook
+boys, the Wickcliffe boys, or the Dalton boys, were natural and logical
+products of an environment. That this should be the more likely may be
+seen from the fact that for a decade or more preceding the great rushes
+of the land grabbers, the exploits of the James and Younger boys in
+train and bank robbing had filled all the country with the belief that
+the law could be defied successfully through a long term of years. The
+Cook boys acted upon this basis, until at length marshals shot them
+both, killed one and sent the remnants of the other to the penitentiary.
+
+Since it would be impossible to go into any detailed mention of the
+scores and hundreds of desperadoes who have at different times been
+produced by the Nations, it may be sufficient to give a few of the
+salient features of the careers of the band which, as well as any, may
+be called typical of the Indian Nations brand of desperadoism--the once
+notorious Dalton boys.
+
+The Dalton family lived in lower Kansas, near Coffeyville, which was
+situated almost directly upon the border of the Nations. They engaged in
+farming, and indeed two of the family were respectable farmers near
+Coffeyville within the last three or four years. The mother of the
+family still lives near Oklahoma City, where she secured a good claim at
+the time of the opening of the Oklahoma lands to white settlement. The
+father, Lewis Dalton, was a Kentucky man and served in the Mexican war.
+He later moved to Jackson county, Missouri, near the home of the
+notorious James and Younger boys, and in 1851 married Adelaide Younger,
+they removing some years later from Missouri to Kansas. Thirteen
+children were born to them, nine sons and four daughters. Charles,
+Henry, Littleton and Coleman Dalton were respected and quiet citizens.
+All the boys had nerve, and many of them reached office as deputy
+marshals. Franklin Dalton was killed while serving as deputy United
+States marshal near Fort Smith, in 1887, his brother Bob being a member
+of the same posse at the time his fight was made with a band of horse
+thieves who resisted arrest. Grattan Dalton, after the death of his
+brother Franklin, was made a deputy United States marshal, after the
+curious but efficient Western fashion of setting dangerous men to work
+at catching dangerous men. He and his posse in 1888 went after a bad
+Indian, who, in the melee, shot Grattan in the arm and escaped. Grattan
+later served as United States deputy marshal in Muskogee district, where
+the courts certainly needed men of stern courage as executives, for they
+had to deal with the most desperate and fearless class of criminals the
+world ever knew. Robert R. Dalton, better known as Bob Dalton, served on
+the posses of his brothers, and soon learned what it was to stand up and
+shoot while being shot at. He turned out to be about the boldest of the
+family, and was accepted as the clan leader later on in their exploits.
+He also was a deputy United States marshal at the dangerous stations of
+Fort Smith and Wichita, having much to do with the desperadoes of the
+Nations. He was chief of the Osage police for some time, and saw
+abundance of violent scenes. Emmett Dalton was also possessed of cool
+nerve, and was soon known as a dangerous man to affront. All the boys
+were good shots, but they seemed to have cared more for the Winchester
+than the six-shooter in their exploits, in which they were perhaps wise,
+for the rifle is of course far the surer when it is possible of use; and
+men mostly rode in that country with rifle under leg.
+
+Uncle Sam is obliged to take such material for his frontier peace
+officers as proves itself efficient in serving processes. A coward may
+be highly moral, but he will not do as a border deputy. The personal
+character of some of the most famous Western deputies would scarcely
+bear careful scrutiny, but the government at Washington is often
+obliged to wink at that sort of thing. There came a time when it
+remained difficult longer to wink at the methods of the Daltons as
+deputies. In one case they ran off with a big bunch of horses and sold
+them in a Kansas town. On account of this episode, Grattan, William, and
+Emmett Dalton made a hurried trip to California. Here they became
+restless, and went back at their old trade, thinking that no one even on
+the Pacific Slope had any right to cause them fear. They held up a train
+in Tulare county and killed a fireman, but were repulsed. Later arrested
+and tried, William was cleared, but Grattan was sentenced to twenty
+years in the penitentiary. He escaped from jail before he got to the
+penitentiary, and rejoined Emmett at the old haunts in the Nations,
+Emmett having evaded arrest in California. The Southern Pacific railway
+had a standing offer of $6,000 for the robbers at the time they were
+killed.
+
+The Daltons were now more or less obliged to hide out, and to make a
+living as best they could, which meant by robbery. On May 9, 1891, the
+Santa Fe train was held up at Wharton, Oklahoma Territory, and the
+express car was robbed, the bandits supposedly being the Daltons. In
+June of the following year another Santa Fe train was robbed at Red
+Rock, in the Cherokee strip. The 'Frisco train was robbed at Vinita,
+Indian Territory. An epidemic of the old methods of the James and
+Younger bands seemed to have broken out in the new railway region of the
+Southwest. The next month the Missouri, Kansas and Texas train was held
+up at Adair, Indian Territory, and a general fight ensued between the
+robbers and the armed guard of the train, assisted by citizens of the
+town. A local physician was killed and several officers and citizens
+wounded, but none of the bandits was hurt, and they got away with a
+heavy loot of the express and baggage cars. At Wharton they had been
+less fortunate, for though they killed the station agent, they were
+rounded up and one of their men, Dan Bryant, was captured, later killing
+and being killed by United States deputy Ed. Short, as mentioned in an
+earlier chapter. Dick Broadwell joined the Dalton gang about now, and
+they nearly always had a few members besides those of their own family;
+their gang being made up and conducted on much the same lines of the
+James boys gang of Missouri, whose exploits they imitated and used as
+text for their bolder deeds. In fact it was the boast of the leader, Bob
+Dalton, in the Coffeyville raid, that he was going to beat anything the
+James boys ever did: to rob two banks in one town at the same time.
+
+Bank robbing was a side line of activity with the Daltons, but they did
+fairly well at it. They held up the bank at El Reno, at a time when no
+one was in the bank except the president's wife, and took $10,000,
+obliging the bank to suspend business. By this time the whole country
+was aroused against them, as it had been against the James and Younger
+boys. Pinkerton detectives had blanket commissions offered, and railway
+and express companies offered rewards running into the thousands. Each
+train across the Indian Nations was accompanied for months by a heavily
+armed guard concealed in the baggage and express cars. Passengers
+dreaded the journey across that country, and the slightest halt of the
+train for any cause was sure to bring to the lips of all the word of
+fear, "the Daltons!" It seems almost incredible of belief that, in these
+modern days of fast railway service, of the telegraph and of rapidly
+increasing settlements, the work of these men could so long have been
+continued; but such, none the less, was the case. The law was powerless,
+and demonstrated its own unfitness to safeguard life and property, as so
+often it has in this country. And, as so often has been the case,
+outraged society at length took the law into its own hands and settled
+the matter.
+
+The full tale of the Dalton robberies and murders will never be known,
+for the region in which they operated was reticent, having its own
+secrets to protect; but at last there came the climax in which the band
+was brought into the limelight of civilized publicity. They lived on the
+border of savagery and civilization. Now the press, the telegraph, the
+whole fabric of modern life, lay near at hand. Their last bold raid,
+therefore, in which they crossed from the country of reticence into that
+of garrulous news gathering, made them more famous than they had ever
+been before. The raid on Coffeyville, October 5, 1892, both established
+and ended their reputation as desperadoes of the border.
+
+The rumor got out that the Daltons were down in the Nations, waiting for
+a chance to raid the town of Coffeyville, but the dreaded attack did not
+come off when it was expected. When it was delivered, therefore, it
+found the town quite unprepared. Bob Dalton was the leader in this
+enterprise. Emmett did not want to go. He declared that too many people
+knew them in Coffeyville, and that the job would prove too big for them
+to handle. He consented to join the party, however, when he found Bob
+determined to make the attempt in any case. There were in the band at
+that time Bob, Emmett, and Grattan Dalton, Bill Powers and Dick
+Broadwell. These lay in rendezvous near Tulsa, in the Osage country, two
+days before the raid, and spent the night before in the timber on Onion
+creek, not far below town. They rode into Coffeyville at half-past nine
+the following morning. The street being somewhat torn up, they turned
+aside into an alley about a hundred yards from the main street, and,
+dismounting, tied their horses, which were thus left some distance from
+the banks, the First National and the bank of C. M. Condon & Co., which
+were the objects of their design.
+
+Grattan Dalton, Dick Broadwell and Bill Powers stepped over to the
+Condon bank, which was occupied at the time by C. T. Carpenter, C. M.
+Ball, the cashier, and T. C. Babb, a bookkeeper. Grattan Dalton threw
+down his rifle on Carpenter, with the customary command to put up his
+hands; the others being attended to by Powers and Broadwell. Producing a
+two-bushel sack, the leader ordered Carpenter to put all the cash into
+it, and the latter obeyed, placing three thousand dollars in silver and
+one thousand in currency in the sack. Grattan wanted the gold, and
+demanded that an inner safe inside the vault should be opened. The
+cashier, Ball, with a shifty falsehood, told him that they could not
+open that safe, for it was set on a time lock, and no one could open it
+before half-past nine o'clock. He told the outlaw that it was now twenty
+minutes after nine (although it was really twenty minutes of ten); and
+the latter said they could wait ten minutes. He was, however, uneasy,
+and was much of the mind to kill Ball on the spot, for he suspected
+treachery, and knew how dangerous any delay must be.
+
+It was a daring thing to do--to sit down in the heart of a civilized
+city, in broad daylight and on the most public street, and wait for a
+time lock to open a burglar-proof safe. Daring as it was, it was foolish
+and futile. As the robbers stood uneasily guarding their prisoners, the
+alarm was spread. A moment later firing began, and the windows of the
+bank were splintered with bullets. The robbers were trapped, Broadwell
+being now shot through the arm, probably by P. L. Williams from across
+the street. Yet they coolly went on with their work as they best could,
+Grattan Dalton ordering Ball to cut the string of the bag and pour out
+the heavy silver, which would have encumbered them too much in their
+flight. He asked if there was not a back way out, by which they could
+escape. He was shown a rear door, and the robbers stepped out, to find
+themselves in the middle of the hottest street fight any of them had
+ever known. The city marshal, Charles T. Connolly, had given the alarm,
+and citizens were hurrying to the street with such weapons as they could
+find at the hardware stores and in their own homes.
+
+Meantime Bob and Emmett Dalton had held up the First National Bank,
+ordering cashier Ayres to hand out the money, and terrorizing two or
+three customers of the bank who happened to be present at the time. Bob
+knew Thos. G. Ayres, and called him by his first name, "Tom," said he,
+"go into the safe and get out that money--get the gold, too." He
+followed Ayres into the vault, and discovered two packages of $5,000
+each in currency, which he tossed into his meal sack. The robbers here
+also poured out the silver, and having cleaned up the bank as they
+supposed, drove the occupants out of the door in front of them. As they
+got into the street they were fired upon by George Cubine and C. S. Cox;
+but neither shot took effect. Emmett Dalton stood with his rifle under
+his arm, coolly tying up the neck of the sack which held the money. They
+then both stepped back into the bank, and went out through the back
+door, which was opened for them by W. H. Shepherd, the bank teller, who,
+with Tom Ayres and B. S. Ayres, the bookkeeper, made the bank force on
+hand. J. H. Brewster, C. H. Hollingsworth and A. W. Knotts were in the
+bank on business, and were joined by E. S. Boothby; all these being left
+unhurt.
+
+The firing became general as soon as the robbers emerged from the two
+bank buildings. The first man to be shot by the robbers was Charles T.
+Gump, who stood not far from the First National Bank armed with a
+shotgun. Before he could fire Bob Dalton shot him through the hand, the
+same bullet disabling his shotgun. A moment later, a young man named
+Lucius Baldwin started down the alley, armed with a revolver. He met
+Bob and Emmett, who ordered him to halt, but for some reason he kept on
+toward them. Bob Dalton said, "I'll have to kill you," and so shot him
+through the chest. He died three hours later.
+
+Bob and Emmett Dalton now passed out of the alley back of the First
+National Bank, and came into Union street. Here they saw George B.
+Cubine standing with his Winchester in his hands, and an instant later
+Cubine fell dead, with three balls through his body. Near him was
+Charles Brown, an old man, who was also armed. He was the next victim,
+his body falling near that of Cubine, though he lived for a few hours
+after being shot. All four of these victims of the Daltons were shot at
+distances of about forty or fifty yards, and with rifles, the revolver
+being more or less uncertain at such ranges even in practiced hands. All
+the gang had revolvers, but none used them.
+
+Thos. G. Ayres, late prisoner in the First National Bank, ran into a
+store near by as soon as he was released, caught up a Winchester and
+took a station near the street door, waiting for the bandits to come out
+at that entrance of the bank. Here he was seen by Bob Dalton, who had
+gone through the alley. Bob took aim and at seventy-five yards shot
+Ayres through the head. Friends tried to draw his body back into the
+store, but these now met the fire of Grattan Dalton and Powers, who,
+with the crippled Broadwell, were now coming out of their alleyway.
+
+T. A. Reynolds, a clerk in the same store, who went to the door armed,
+received a shot through the foot, and thus made the third wounded man
+then in that building. H. H. Isham, one of the owners of the store,
+aided by M. A. Anderson and Charles K. Smith, joined in the firing.
+Grattan Dalton and Bill Powers were shot mortally before they had gone
+more than a few steps from the door of the Condon bank. Powers tried to
+get into a door when he was shot, and kept his feet when he found the
+door locked, managing to get to his horse in the alley before he was
+killed by a second shot. Grattan Dalton also kept his feet, and reached
+cover back of a barn about seventy yards from Walnut Street, the main
+thorough-fare. He stood at bay here, and kept on firing. City marshal
+Connolly, carrying a rifle, ran across to a spot near the corner of this
+barn. He had his eye on the horses of the bandits, which were still
+hitched in the alley. His back was turned toward Grattan Dalton. The
+latter must have been crippled somewhere in his right arm or shoulder,
+for he did not raise his rifle to his face, but fired from his hip,
+shooting Connolly down at a distance of about twenty feet or so.
+
+There was a slight lull at this point of the street fight, and during
+this Dick Broadwell, who had been wounded again in the back, crawled
+into concealment in a lumber yard near by the alley where the horses
+were tied. He crept out to his horse and mounted, but just as he started
+away met the livery man, John J. Kloehr, who did some of the best
+shooting recorded by the citizens. Kloehr was hurrying thither with
+Carey Seaman, the latter armed with a shotgun. Kloehr fired his rifle
+and Seaman his shotgun, and both struck Broadwell, who rode away, but
+fell dead from his horse a short distance outside the town.
+
+Bob and Emmett Dalton, after killing Cubine and Brown and shooting
+Ayres, hurried on to join their companions and to get to their horses.
+At an alleyway junction they spied F. D. Benson climbing out of a
+window, and fired at him, but missed. An instant later, as Bob stepped
+into full view of those who were firing from the Isham store, he was
+struck by a ball and badly wounded. He walked slowly across the alley
+and sat down on a pile of stones, but like his brother Grattan, he kept
+his rifle going, though mortally shot. He fired once at Kloehr, but was
+unsteady and missed him. Rising to his feet he walked a few paces and
+leaned against the corner of a barn, firing two more shots. He was then
+killed by Kloehr, who shot him through the chest.
+
+By this time Grattan Dalton was feebly trying to get to his horse. He
+passed the body of Connolly, whom he had killed, faced toward his
+pursuers and tried to fire. He, too, fell before Kloehr's Winchester,
+shot through the throat, dropping close to the body of Connolly.
+
+Emmett Dalton was now the only one of the band left alive. He was as yet
+unwounded, and he got to his horse. As he attempted to mount a number of
+shots were fired at him, and these killed the two horses belonging to
+Bob Dalton and Bill Powers, who by this time had no further use for
+horses. Two horses hitched to an oil wagon in the street were also
+killed by wild shots. Emmett got into his saddle, but was shot through
+the right arm and through the left hip and groin. He still clung to the
+sack of money they had taken at the First National Bank, and he still
+kept his nerve and his wits even under such pressure of peril. He might
+have escaped, but instead he rode back to where Bob was lying, and
+reached down his hand to help him up behind himself on the horse. Bob
+was dying and told him it was no use to try to help him. As Emmett
+stooped down to reach Bob's arm, Carey Seaman fired both barrels of his
+shotgun into his back, Emmett dropping near Bob and falling upon the
+sack, containing over $20,000 in cash. Men hurried up and called to him
+to throw up his hands. He raised his one unhurt arm and begged for
+mercy. It was supposed he would die, and he was not lynched, but hurried
+away to a doctor's office near by.
+
+In the little alley where the last scene of this bloody fight took place
+there were found three dead men, one dying man and one badly wounded.
+Three dead horses lay near the same spot. In the whole fight, which was
+of course all over in a few moments, there were killed four citizens and
+four outlaws, three citizens and one outlaw being wounded. Less than a
+dozen citizens did most of the shooting, of which there was
+considerable, eighty bullet marks being found on the front of the
+Condon bank alone.
+
+The news of this bloody encounter was instantly flashed over the
+country, and within a few hours the town was crowded with sightseers who
+came in by train loads. The dead bandits were photographed, and the
+story of the fight was told over and over again, not always with
+uniformity of detail. Emmett Dalton, before he was sent to the
+penitentiary, confessed to different crimes, not all of them hitherto
+known, which the gang had at different times committed.
+
+So ended in blood the career of as bloody a band as might well be
+discovered in the robber history of any land or time of the world.
+Indeed, it is doubtful if any country ever saw leagues of robbers so
+desperate as those which have existed in America, any with hands so red
+in blood. This fact is largely due to the peculiar history of this
+country, with its rapid development under swift modern methods of
+transportation. In America the advance to the westward of the fighting
+edge of civilization, where it meets and mingles with savagery, has been
+more rapid than has ever been known in the settlement of any country of
+the world. Moreover, this has taken place at precisely that time when
+weapons of the most deadly nature have been invented and made at a price
+permitting all to own them and many to become extremely skilled with
+them. The temptation and the means of murder have gone hand in hand. And
+in time the people, not the organized law courts, have applied the
+remedy when the time has come for it. To-day the Indian Nations are no
+more than a name. Civilization has taken them over. Statehood has
+followed territorial organization. Presently rich farms will make a
+continuous sea of grain across what was once a flood of crime, and the
+wheat will grow yellow, and the cotton white, where so long the grass
+was red.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XXII
+
+Desperadoes of the Cities--_Great Cities Now the Most Dangerous
+Places_--_City Bad Men's Contempt for Womanhood_--_Nine Thousand Murders
+a Year, and Not Two Hundred Punished_--_The Reasonableness of Lynch
+Law_.
+
+
+It was stated early in these pages that the great cities and the great
+wildernesses are the two homes for bold crimes; but we have been most
+largely concerned with the latter in our studies of desperadoes and in
+our search for examples of disregard of the law. We have found a
+turbulence, a self-insistence, a vigor and self-reliance in the American
+character which at times has led on to lawlessness on our Western
+frontier.
+
+Conditions have changed. We still revel in Wild West literature, but
+there is little of the wild left in the West of to-day, little of the
+old lawlessness. The most lawless time of America is to-day, but the
+most lawless parts of America are the most highly civilized parts. The
+most dangerous section of America is not the West, but the East.
+
+The worst men are no longer those of the mountains or the plains, but of
+the great cities. The most absolute lawlessness exists under the shadow
+of the tallest temples of the law, and in the penetralia of that society
+which vaunts itself as the supreme civilization of the world. We have
+had no purpose in these pages to praise any sort of crime or to glorify
+any manner of bad deeds; but if we were forced to make choice among
+criminals, then by all means that choice should be, must be, not the
+brutal murderer of the cities, but the desperado of the old West. The
+one is an assassin, the other was a warrior; the one is a dastard, the
+other was something of a man.
+
+A lawlessness which arises to magnitude is not called lawlessness; and
+killing more than murder is called war. The great industrial centers
+show us what ruthlessness may mean, more cruel and more dangerous than
+the worst deeds of our border fighting men. As for the criminal records
+of our great cities, they surpass by infinity those of the rudest
+wilderness anarchy. Their nature at times would cause a hardened
+desperado of the West to blush for shame.
+
+One distinguished feature of city badness is the great number of crimes
+against women, ranging from robbery to murder. Now, the desperado, the
+bandit, the robber of the wildest West never made war on any woman,
+rarely ever robbed a woman, even when women mingled with the victims of
+a "stand and deliver" general robbery of a stage or train. The man who
+would kill a woman in the West could never meet his fellow in fair fight
+again. The rope was ready for him, and that right quickly.
+
+But how is it in the great cities, under the shadow of the law? Forget
+the crimes of industrialism, the sweat-shops and factories, which
+undermine the last hope of a nation--the constitution of its women--and
+take the open and admitted crimes. One city will suffice for this, and
+that may be the city of Chicago.
+
+In Chicago, in the past twenty-four years, very nearly two thousand
+murders have been committed; and of these, two hundred remain mysteries
+to-day, their perpetrators having gone free and undetected. In the past
+year, seventeen women have been murdered in Chicago, some under
+circumstances too horrible to mention. In a list of fifty murders by
+unknown parties during the last few years, the whole gamut of dastardly
+crime has been run. The slaughter list is appalling. The story of this
+killing of women is so repellant that one turns to the bloodiest deeds
+of Western personal combats with a feeling of relief; and as one does so
+one adds, "Here at least were men."
+
+The story of Chicago is little worse, according to her population, than
+that of New York, of Boston, of any large city. Foot up the total of the
+thousands of murders committed every year in America. Then, if you wish
+to become a criminal statistician, compare that record with those of
+England, France or Germany. We kill ten persons to England's one; and we
+kill them in the cities.
+
+In the cities it is unlawful to wear arms, and to protect one's self
+against armed attack is therefore impossible. In the cities we have
+policemen. Against real fighting men, the average policeman would be
+helpless. Yet, such as he is, he must be the sole fence against the
+bloody-minded who do not scruple at robbery and murder. In the labor
+riots, the streets of a city are avenues of anarchy, and none of our
+weak-souled officials, held in the cursed thrall of politics, seems
+able to prevent it. A dozen town marshals of the old stripe would
+restore peace and fill a graveyard in one day of any strike; and their
+peace would be permanent. A real town marshal at the head of a city
+police force, with real fighting men under him, could restore peace and
+fill a graveyard in one month in any city; and that peace would be
+permanent. If we wished the law, we could have it.
+
+The history of the bloodiest lawlessness of the American past shows
+continual repetitions. First, liberty is construed to mean license, and
+license unrebuked leads on to insolence. Still left unrebuked, license
+organizes against the law, taking the form of gangs, factions, bandit
+clans. Then in time the spirit of law arises, and not the law, but the
+offended individuals wronged by too much license, take the matter into
+their own hands, not waiting for the courts, but executing a swifter
+justice. It is the terror of lynch law which has, in countless
+instances, been the foundation of the later courts, with their slow
+moving and absurdly inefficient methods. In time the inefficiency of the
+courts once more begets impatience and contempt. The people again rebel
+at the fact that their government gives them no government, that their
+courts give them no justice, that their peace officers give them no
+protection. Then they take matters into their hands once more, and show
+both courts and criminals that the people still are strong and terrible.
+
+The deprecation of lynch law, and the whining cry that the law should be
+supported, that the courts should pass on the punishment, is in the
+first place the plea of the weak, and in the second place, the plea of
+the ignorant. He has not read the history of this country, and has never
+understood the American character who says lynch law is wrong. It has
+been the salvation of America a thousand times. It may perhaps again be
+her salvation.
+
+In one way or another the American people will assert the old vigilante
+principle that a man's life, given him by God, and a man's property,
+earned by his own labor, are things he is entitled to defend or have
+defended. He never wholly delegates this right to any government. He may
+rescind his qualified delegation when he finds his chosen servants
+unfaithful or inefficient; and so have back again clean his own great
+and imperishable human rights. A wise law and one enforced is tolerable.
+An unjust and impure law is intolerable, and it is no wrong to cast
+off allegiance to it. If so, Magna Charta was wrong, and the American
+Revolution earth's greatest example of lynch law!
+
+[Illustration: "AFTERWARD"
+Fritz Graveyard, New Mexico. Many victims of the Lincoln County War
+buried here]
+
+Conclusions parallel to these are expressed by no less a citizen than
+Andrew D. White, long United States Minister to Germany, who, in the
+course of an address at a prominent university of America, in the year
+1906, made the following bold remarks:
+
+"There is a well-defined criminal class in all of our cities; a class of
+men who make crime a profession. Deaths by violence are increasing
+rapidly. Our record is now larger than any other country of the world.
+The number of homicides that are punished by lynching exceeds the number
+punished by due process of law. There is nothing more nonsensical or
+ridiculous than the goody-goody talk about lynching. Much may be said in
+favor of Goldwin Smith's quotation, that 'there are communities in which
+lynch law is better than any other.'
+
+"The pendulum has swung from extreme severity in the last century to
+extreme laxity in this century. There has sprung up a certain
+sentimental sympathy. In the word of a distinguished jurist, 'the
+taking of life for the highest crime after due process of law is the
+only taking of life which the American people condemn.'
+
+"In the next year 9,000 people will be murdered. As I stand here to-day
+I tell you that 9,000 are doomed to death with all the cruelty of the
+criminal heart, and with no regard for home and families; and two-thirds
+will be due to the maudlin sentiment sometimes called mercy.
+
+"I have no sympathy for the criminal. My sympathy is for those who will
+be murdered; for their families and for their children. This sham
+humanitarianism has become a stench. The cry now is for righteousness.
+The past generation has abolished human slavery. It is for the present
+to deal with the problems of the future, and among them this problem of
+crime."
+
+Against doctrine of this sort none will protest but the politicians in
+power, under whose lax administration of a great trust there has arisen
+one of the saddest spectacles of human history, the decay of the great
+American principles of liberty and fair play. The criminals of our city
+are bold, because they, if not ourselves, know of this decay. They, if
+not ourselves, know the weakness of that political system to which we
+have, in carelessness equaling that of the California miners of old--a
+carelessness based upon a madness of money equal to or surpassing that
+of the gold stampedes--delegated our sacred personal rights to live
+freely, to own property, and to protect each for himself his home.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Story of the Outlaw, by Emerson Hough
+
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