The Mammoth Book of the West (32 page)

Nor did a fall into outlawry seem inexplicable or contemptible to Westerners. Pioneers and settlers lived poor, precarious lives with ruin an ever-present possibility. A bad break, with the weather, with illness, the loss of a family member (and indispensable labourer), and they might slip into a penury where stealing was an attractive option. To a boy stuck on the infinite boredom of a farm, the excitement of the outlaw life was a magnet that some could not resist. And farm boys, with their long hours spent taking pot shots at targets, tended to make excellent gunslingers.

A handful of outlaws became more than Robin Hoods;
they became symbols of – even fighters for – underdog causes. Notorious club-footed gunfighter Clay Allison, almost certainly mentally deranged by a blow to his head while serving with the Tennessee Light Infantry, became a central figure in the resistance of the residents of Colfax County, New Mexico, to a real-estate grab by the powerful Maxwell Land Grant Company. Apparently charming when sober but deadly when drunk, Allison killed four men in his gunfighting career, as well as leading a lynch mob against a man called Kennedy who had committed infanticide. Allison cut off the dead man’s head and rode to the saloon with it. For a man who lived by his gun, Allison suffered an ignominious death. In 1878, probably drunk, he toppled from a wagon while trying to retrieve a grain sack and one of the wheels went over his neck. Meanwhile, the mysterious Mexican–Californian bandit Joaquin Murieta, who robbed Anglo “forty-niners”, was a hero to Hispanics ill-treated by Whites in the goldfields. (See also postscript on
p 279
.)

At least at the beginning of his career John Wesley Hardin was an outlaw with a cause, even if it was an ignoble one. Less well known than Jesse James, Billy the Kid, or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the “Terror from Texas” was perhaps the greatest killer in the history of the West, challenged only in homicides by professional gunfighters Jim Miller and Walter Crow. Hardin’s victims are estimated to number anywhere from 11 to 44. The son of a Methodist circuit preacher (hence his middle name), born in 1853, Hardin grew up in a locale and time amongst the most violent in the Wild West – central Texas during the post-Civil War period. According to his family, he was deeply traumatized by the massacre of his uncle’s family by a Union mob. While the miscreants did not include any Blacks, Southern sympathies and racial prejudice caused the 15-year-old Hardin to kill his first man, Mage, an
ex-slave. “To be tried at that time,” wrote Hardin in his autobiography,
The Life of John Wesley Hardin
(1896), “for the killing of a negro meant certain death at the hands of a court backed by Northern bayonets . . . thus, unwillingly, I became a fugitive not from justice, be it known, but from the injustice and misrule of the people who had subjugated the South.”

By his own account, Hardin then killed three soldiers (one a Negro) who pursued him. For these actions, Hardin was applauded ecstatically by the White racist, anti-Reconstruction bloc in Texas politics, who elevated him to the status of a hero. If not hired directly by the anti-Reconstructionists, Hardin certainly used his gun for their ends. More deaths of Blacks followed.

By 1871 the fugitive Hardin had taken to the life of a cowboy, driving the cattle of Columbus Carol up the trail to Abilene. There the youthful, lithe gunslinger encountered Wild Bill Hickok and reputedly faced him down. Others declare that Hardin shot a man in the American Hotel because his snoring disturbed him. Hickok moved to arrest the gunfighter, but Hardin escaped out of the window dressed only in his undershirt.

Returning to Texas, Hardin took a hand in the Sutton–Taylor feud which had long troubled DeWitt County. The origin of the feud is obscure, but latterly it had taken a political turn; the Sutton faction was generally pro-Reconstruction, the Taylors anti-Reconstruction. Naturally, Hardin sided with the latter and on 17 May 1873, in front of the blacksmith’s shop in Albuquerque, Texas, slew a prominent Sutton supporter, Captain Jack Helm. Although the shooting took place in front of a crowd of Helm’s friends, none felt brave enough to retaliate. Hardin wrote later: “The news soon spread that I had killed Jack Helms [
sic
] and I received many letters of thanks from the widows of the men whom he had cruelly put to death.
Many of the best citizens of Gonzales and DeWitt counties patted me on the back and told me that it was the best act of my life.”

The most dramatic gunfighting exploit in Hardin’s life came a year later, in May 1874, in the wild Texas town of Comanche. After a day at the races, Hardin and deputy sheriff Charles Webb walked along the street to a saloon, Webb falsely procaliming friendship. When Hardin’s attention was momentarily distracted, Webb drew his gun and began pulling back the trigger. At speed almost beyond belief, Hardin jumped aside, drew, and put a bullet in Webb’s head, the latter’s shot only wounding the outlaw.

But the killing of Webb forced Hardin to flee Texas and take up a refugee life in Florida and Alabama. Captured by the Rangers at Pensacola Junction, Florida, Hardin was taken back to Texas and incarcerated at Huntsville. While in prison his adored wife died.

By the time of his release in 1892, Hardin was a changed, dispirited man. He had taught himself law in prison and opened a legal firm in El Paso, Texas, but clients (unsurprisingly) were few. Much of his time was spent in heavy drinking in local bars. It was in such an establishment, the Acme Saloon, that he was shot in the back of the head on the night of 19 August 1895. His assailant was John Selman, a local policeman and old-style Texas gunslinger, who probably shot Hardin for the fame of it.

Hardin was not the only outlaw-hero in the pantheon of Texan anti-Reconstructionists. There was also William P. Longley, who killed his first Black in 1866, when Longley was 15. Longley was not prosecuted, and after killing three more Blacks, he left his home at Evergreen and worked the West as a cowboy, gambler and teamster. He returned home in 1875 and murdered Wilson Anderson, who was suspected of killing his cousin. Although Longley fled to Louisiana, Texas lawmen crossed the border and brought
him back to stand trial for the Anderson murder. He went to the gallows on 11 October 1878. Before putting his head in the noose, he looked at the 4,000-strong crowd and remarked, “I see a good many enemies and mighty few friends.” He had to be hung twice, for the first time he dropped his feet touched the ground.

But Blacks were not only on the receiving end of outlaw guns, they gave death and crime as well as taking it. Born into slavery in Arkansas in 1849, Isom Dart began his life in crime pilfering for Confederate officers during the Civil War. After the war he joined a young Mexican stealing cattle south of the border to sell in Texas, then transferred his rustling activity to rugged Brown’s Park, Colorado, a haven for cattle thieves. Periodically, Dart tried to “go straight” and earned a local reputation as bronc-buster, but always ended up back in the rustler’s saddle. On one notable occasion he was arrested by a Wyoming deputy sheriff who was then injured when his buckboard left the road. The uninjured Dart gathered up the horses, lifted the buckboard onto its wheels, loaded on the deputy and drove to the hospital at Rock Springs. There, Dart turned himself in at the town jail. The impressed officials immediately let him go. Local cattle barons were less impressed. Dart was assassinated in 1900, probably by the cattlemen’s hired killer, Tom Horn.

Cherokee Bill was a Black Billy the Kid, sharing with the latter a youthful impulsiveness, a love of guns, and a life cut short at the age of 21. Cherokee Bill was born Cranford Goldsby on the military reservation of Fort Concho, Texas, where his father was a buffalo soldier (as Black servicemen became known, on account of their wiry hair, which Indians said reminded them of the bison) in the famed 10th Cavalry.
When the family split up and his mother remarried, the teenage Cranford was pushed out on his own and fell in with bad company. At 18 he had his first gunfight, wounding a middle-aged Black man who had beaten him with his fists. Afterwards, he roamed the Cherokee, Seminole and Creek Nations and joined the outlaw gang of Jim and Bill Cook. Unlike White outlaws, the Black Cherokee Bill (who also had Indian blood, hence the nickname) could travel Oklahoma’s Indian lands without interference, something which gave him a distinct advantage over the posses who pursued him for his persistent armed robberies of stores and railroads. Finally, at the age of 20 Cherokee Bill was caught and sentenced to die for murder (it was claimed that he had managed to kill 13 men in his two-year run, and Judge Parker called him an “inhuman monster”). On a fine day in 1896 Cherokee Bill was taken into the courtyard at Fort Smith to be hanged. Looking up at the sky he remarked, “This is about as good a day as any to die.” At the instruction of the guard he stood over the trap. Asked if he had any last words, Cherokee came out with one of the West’s best epitaphs: “I came here to die, not make a speech.”

Unlike Dart and Cherokee Bill, Dodge City Black outlaw Ben Hodges died of old age, expiring in 1929. Photographs show Hodges toting a shotgun, but he tended to rely on his wits and tongue above firearms. Arriving in the Kansas cowtown with a trail crew he heard a story about an unclaimed Spanish land grant, and promptly pretended to be from an old aristocratic Spanish family, the tract’s rightful owner. Residents of Dodge, and even total strangers, supported his claim. When this failed, he successfully swindled Dodge City National Bank and made the railroads believe he was a VIP, at which they gave him an annual free pass. Later charged with rustling a herd of cattle, he pleaded his own case. His two-hour summary was a masterpiece of theatre:

What me, the descendant of old grandees of Spain, the owner of a land grant embracing millions of acres, the owner of gold mines and villages and towns situated on that grant of which I am sole owner, to steal a miserable, miserly lot of old cows? Why, the idea is absurd. No gentlemen, I think too much of the race of men from which I sprang, to disgrace their memory.

On another occasion, Hodges – protesting profound Republican sympathies – asked the governor to appoint him to a job as a livestock inspector. As one rancher put it, this was “like a wolf asking to guard the sheep pen.” Needless to say, Hodges’s application was turned down. A few years later, vigilantes caught Hodges and charged him with rustling. Unable to find definite proof, they satisfied themselves with a precautionary severing of the tendons in both Hodges’s ankles, thus crippling him.

Only rarely did American Indians turn outlaw. A number so classed – like the Apache Kid – were more accurately renegades, men too full of independent spirit to submit to the confines of reservation life. But a few were unmistakably criminal, and several became lovers of “bandit queen” Myra Belle Shirley. These were Blue Duck, Sam Starr – whose name Belle took – and Jim July. All were horse thieves and robbers.

Another Indian outlaw, Ned Christie, served with the Cherokee tribal legislature, before a seven-year spree as an outlaw in the Oklahoma Territory. In 1892 Judge Parker’s deputies finally cornered him and two accomplices in a log fort in Tahlequah. To assail the fortress, marshals Heck Thomas and Paden Tolbert used an army cannon. Thirty rounds of artillery fire bounced off the log walls, as did 2,000 rounds from rifles. The exasperated lawmen were reduced to blowing off the side of the cabin with dynamite. Christie came out fighting and was shot dead. A victory
photograph was taken of the dead Indian, propped up on a photographer’s board, with his rifle cradled in his arms.

For 13 days in 1895, the Creek gang of Rufus Buck went wild in Indian Territory, setting a criminal record exceeding that of more famous, White outlaws. The five teenagers began by shooting a Black deputy marshal, John Barrett, near Okmulgee, then raped two women, held up a stockman, killing the Black boy accompanying him, stole horses and committed several more hold-ups.

Their reign of terror ended on 10 August, when they were surrounded by marshals and a posse of Creek Light Horse (Creek police) in a grove outside of Muskogee. At the end of their trial before Judge Parker, the gang’s despondent state-appointed attorney entered the shortest defence on record: “May it please the court and gentlemen of the jury, you have heard the evidence. I have nothing to say.” The five – Rufus Buck, Maomi July, Sam Sampson, Luckey Davis and Lewis Davis – were hanged together on 1 July 1896.

When the hangman had finished, guards cleaning Buck’s cell found a picture of his mother with a poem written on the back:

I dreamt I was in Heaven

Among the Angels fair;

I’d ne’er seen none so handsome

That twine in golden hair.

They looked so neat and sang so sweet

And played the Golden Harp.

I was about to pick an angel out

And take her to my heart:

But the moment I began to plea,

I thought of you, my love.

There was none I’d seen so beautiful

On earth, or Heaven above.

Good by, my dear wife and Mother

Also my sister.

No explanation was ever advanced as to why Buck and his confederates went on their spree.

Buck was not the only poet outlaw. Stagecoach robber Charles E. Bole, alias “Black Bart”, liked to leave poems at the scene of his crimes, one of which read:

I’ve labored long and hard for bread,

For honor and for riches

But on my corns too long you’ve tred,

You fine-haired sons of bitches.

Another:

Here I lay me down to sleep

To wait the coming morrow,

Perhaps success, perhaps defeat

And everlasting sorrow;

Yet come what will, I’ll try it once,

My condition can’t be worse,

And if there’s money in that box,

’Tis munney in my purse.

Bole was captured in 1882 after he left a handkerchief at a scene of a crime, Wells Fargo agent James Bunyan Hume tracking its tell-tale laundry mark, “F.O.X. 7”, back to Bole through 91 laundries. However, he served only a moderate term in penitentiary because he had used an empty shotgun on his hold-ups. Released in 1888, Bole disappeared from view for ever.