Outlaws of the Old West Compiled by Charles D. Anderson ELECTRONIC VERSION 1.0 (Apr 04 00).

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INTRODUCTION By Charles D. Anderson Editor, Mankind Books Throughout history there have been men--and women too, for that matter--who have placed themselves above and outside the laws that govern ordinary men. Call them outlaws or criminals, their actions have been motivated by personal gain, vengeance, rebellion and so forth... reasons very justifiable to them. And those people are still with us, as a glance at the front page of any newspaper will show. The outlaws of the Old West weren't really that colorful, although some were ingeniously enterprising and ruthless. And by today's standards their crimes weren't that terrible. We are undoubtedly more appalled by reports of senseless mass slayings today than the average person in Abilene was at the news of a stage holdup. And while citizens walking the streets of Dodge City might have been startled to find themselves in the midst of a spontaneous gunfight, we sometimes find ourselves wondering whether it's even safe to venture out onto the streets at all. This is not intended to underrate the crimes of the Old West, because taken on a relative basis they could be extremely serious to the victims. The Frontier was isolated and desolate. Limited transportation and the precarious trip itself had required men and women who had made the phenomenal journey from the East to leave behind many prized belongings. Consequently, private property was highly valued and would often be defended to the death. Whatever possessions existed, whether for practical or sentimental purpose, were essentially one of a kind items that could not be simply replaced. They were belongings that represented hardship and deprivation, and their loss through robberies and lootings could be a heartbreaking catastrophe. What really gives the outlaws of the Old West a unique quality--apart from the romantic lore that has grown up around them--is the stage on which they performed. And therefore, to fully understand their presence in the West and their quick-draw motivations with the six-shooter, we have to understand something of the times and temperament that was the American West. In many respects the Old West is like the ante-bellum South. It is a civilization gone with the wind. There was no equivalent of the American Frontier anyplace else in the world It was a land of backbreaking challenges where survival itself was constantly jeopardized by awesome obstacles. And it existed in a time when the United States was "a house divided," with brother turned against brother under the glorious blue-gray patriotism that was the Civil War. The American Frontier represented the hope for a new start, for new lands to conquer, and the entire westward expansion was the ultimate challenge to

the individualistic spirit that had first caused the colonists to break away from the domination of England. The Frontier was and still is a truly American institution, as John F. Kennedy reminded us in his inaugural address when he spoke of the challenges that face us at the New Frontier. The noted historian Frederick Jackson Turner theorized that the development of the American way of life as we know it could be traced back to the Frontier. It was a land of rebirth--a promised land that beckoned pioneers who were strong in mind, heart and body. And in that rebirth, as institutions were reformed and rethought, man became shaped by his environment. Also, according to Turner, it was a land that served as a "safety valve," utilizing the "wide open spaces" to minimize or remove the pressures that had been building up within the cities of the East. It seems as if the culture and technology of each era in American history contributes toward the breeding of outlaws and criminals indigenous to that period. A good example of this is the airline hijacker. And so it was that the stage was set for the outlaws of the Old West--not only for those bred in the Frontier spirit, but also for those who sought to escape the dutches of eastern police. The openness of the land, and the majestic mountains and deep canyons made the West a very attractive hiding place. The very nature of the Frontier experience was also highly conducive to outlawry. In the first place, honest money was very hard to come by. As the article on Sam Bass points out, it would have taken a cowboy more than 33 years to earn the $10,000 that Bass picked up in one robbery. And that cowboy would have worked in the dust and open air all month, from sunrise until late into the night, and maybe have taken home $30. While need inspired some outlaws, greed spurred others. Many a rustler justified his thievery as he thought of the carte blanche that had contributed to the success of the land, mine and railroad barons. And then there were those who were either unwilling or unable to face up to the demands of the West. Earning a living, when jobs were available, was a back-breaking consideration. And as one author points out, in the case of raising crops it could also be bitterly frustrating. The days following the Civil War were free-wheeling and generally lawless. Outlaws like John Wesley Hardin got their start because they were filled with resentment at what they saw going on around them. Men who had faced danger and death on the battlefield considered the West a land of opportunity for anyone proficient and daring enough with a gun. And initially there was hardly anyone to give them an argument. For a long time the law was carried around in each man's holster, and he dealt that law with a heavy hand, depending on which side of the fence he stood on such cut and dried matters as cowboy vs. farmer and cattle vs. sheep. And whoever had the more men and guns on his side obviously had a greater share of the law. There was hardly any taxation to speak of, and consequently some areas simply didn't have the money to pay a sheriff. Squabbles amongst the neighbors couldn't be settled by a quick call to the police, nor were the courts available to make a judgment on a lawsuit. Another factor that contributed to outlawry was the great surge of boomtowns. As towns like Dodge, Tombstone, Abilene and Virginia City mushroomed, their rapid, boisterous growth didn't seem to leave much room

for effective law enforcement. And the outlaws, quick to sniff out a good thing, followed the boom. But in the same way that factors inherent to the westward expansion contributed to unbridled outlawry, the progress and the innovative spirit that was the Frontier tradition helped to put it down. By 1869 the railroad had already spanned the United States, and desperados who had escaped the eastern police by vanishing into the painted expanse of the West were now being relentlessly pursued. The coming of the telegraph speeded descriptions of the outlaws from town to town, and the pony express conveyed that well-known western publication, the Wanted poster. Time was rapidly running out for the gunslingers and stage robbers, not to mention the rustlers who were being severely frustrated by that new-fangled stuff, barbed wire. After a while some of the outlaws began to consider going straight. Both the Wells Fargo stage line and the Union Pacific railroad hired former outlaws to ride guard. Others tried to hold out until the end, and the end usually meant a sheriffs bullet. In most cases they died relatively young, which really isn't so surprising considering the life they had chosen for themselves. The Frontier spirit of the Old West seemed to inspire the outlaws toward a code of honor all their own. And because of this some western outlaws have been treated in motion pictures and on television as more hero than criminal. Films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and even the heavily documented How The West Was Won, show the grueling hardships, but the end result is one of glamorization, of romanticizing the facts... not unlike the treatment of those two other great American outlaws, Bonnie and Clyde. It's been said that being a hero is just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Perhaps the same is true of the outlaw. And for men outside the law there has seldom been a time in this country's history that has presented more opportunities than during the period that we have come to know as the Old West. RINGO : CHAMPION OF THE OUTLAWS by Clayton Matthews John Ringo strode the legendary streets of Tombstone, Arizona, in the 1880's like a brooding Hamlet among outlaws--introspective, darkly handsome, absolutely fearless. Altogether a romantic but tragic figure. In 1880 Tombstone was at the peak of boom times. It evolved from nothing to a town of some six thousand people after Ed Schieffielin discovered silver in the Tombstone hills in 1878, and started the Lucky Cuss mine. Tombstone then sprang up out of the desert overnight. Before that it was an area of brown, treeless hills, a land of cacti, greasewood, and hostile Apaches. Unlike many other western boomtowns, Tombstone had some law and order--too much law, some said. However, there were those people who said the lawmen themselves were little better than crooks and killers. In 1881, Tombstone even elected a mayor. But the two factions in town were feuding with each other--Sheriff Johnny Behan and Marshal Wyatt Earp. Earp had the guns and the power on his side: his three brothers and Doc Holliday, the ex-dentist, who was as coldblooded a killer as any the West ever knew.

The feud between the two factions, according to most reports, sprang from the fact that Johnny Behan was appointed sheriff of Tombstone and Cochise County instead of Wyatt Earp. Marshall Earp stoutly denied that he had ever coveted the job, but most stories have it otherwise. This feud is important for the fact that Behan was also made tax assessor. Sheriff Behan soon appointed one William "Billy" Breakenridge his deputy, and it fell upon Breakenridge to collect the taxes. In a shrewd and daring move, Breakenridge recruited Cochise County's most notorious cattle rustler, Curly Bill Brocius, to help him collect the taxes. Laughter ran through Tombstone like a flash flood, when the story spread that Behan's deputy was using Curly Bill to collect taxes. This added fire to the feud between the Earp faction and Johnny Behan. The Earps were the leading figures of what had become known as the "Law and Order Party" in Tombstone, and they made disparaging remarks about Behan's alliance with the rustlers, notably Curly Bill's gang headquartered in the town of Galeyville. And John Ringo, while supposedly second in command of Curly Bill's bunch, was actually the guiding spirit of the rustlers of Galeyville. Curly Bill led the rustling forays more often than Ringo, but that was because of Ringo's frequent withdrawals from his own kind. John Ringo was a true enigma. Most of the outlaws of the Old West were just plain bad, very little white with the black. Perhaps it was in their genes and that was the particular time for it, with very little in the way of law to stop them. Whatever their reasons, many killed and plundered for the sheer joy of it. In a few, there were equal parts of good and bad. John Ringo was such a man. Much has been written in fiction and shown on film about the gallantry of western badmen toward women. This was not always the case. Many outlaws would kill anything--men, women or children--if given a reason. Or for no reason at all. Ringo revered women. He shortened his name from Ringgold so that his three sisters would not know of his outlawry. Even the lowest of women received respect from Ringo. And that other western canard--an outlaw will keep his word, even unto death, and was always loyal to his friends--could have been coined to fit Ringo. He never once broke his word or betrayed a friend's trust. Gallantry? Loyalty? Fearlessness? This would seem to describe a paragon among men. Not so. Ringo gambled, drank to an excess, robbed and plundered and killed with a ferret's ferocity. Billy Breakenridge, the deputy mentioned earlier and a deadly gunfighter in his own right, was once asked who was the most outstanding gunfighter he had ever encountered. Breakenridge answered without hesitation: "John Ringo. Ringo would have made me look like an amateur... as for Wyatt Earp, certainly I have no reason to like the man, but I wouldn't deny that he must have been an expert with the six-shooter. And, if Earp had been given the job of gathering in Ringo, I think that he would have gone out and tried to bring Ringo in. So would I. But probably it's just as well that I never had to go up against Ringo in a gunplay and my own opinion is that Earp felt the same way."

Ringo never faced any of the Earp faction in a gun battle, but he defied them a number of times, usually when he was drinking heavily. Alcohol was Ringo's enemy more than any gun-fighter. He drank to forget--his past and his present outlawry. He was a tall man, six feet two, lean, with somber blue eyes. Since his birthdate is not a matter of record, his age at the time he prowled Tombstone is not known. He was born in Texas, spoke literate English and was clearly well-educated. It was believed by some that Ringo had a college education, but this seems doubtful. In Texas, while still in his teens, he became involved in a feud between sheep and cattle men. His only brother was killed in the feud. Ringo hunted down and killed the three men who had murdered his brother. He left Texas to escape the law and wandered the West for years, earning his way either by playing cards or with his gun, before coming to Tombstone at the height of the boom and joining up with Curly Bill. It is not known how many men John Ringo killed during his wanderings; he was not a man given to boasting. Ringo was a second cousin to the infamous Younger brothers of Missouri, so perhaps it followed naturally that he was fated from birth to become a killer and outlaw. At the time Ringo came to Tombstone his three sisters lived in San Jose, California, with Colonel Coleman Younger, Ringo's grandfather. Once, while in the company of Deputy Breakenridge, Ringo pulled a letter from his pocket and read it with an air of melancholy. He finally told Breakenridge that the letter was from one of his sisters in California. She wrote him regularly, thinking he was in the cattle business and doing fine. Ringo commented sadly that he hoped she never learned the truth about him. Tombstone tamed down somewhat after the Earps, Sheriff Behan and Deputy Breakenridge started riding herd on the town. This galled Ringo considerably. He was fond of the old frontier tradition of wide-open towns, where a man could drink, shoot up the town if he felt like it, or even kill with impunity. And the coming of law and order had dimmed Tombstone's reputation as the toughest town in the southwest. Ringo blamed Wyatt Earp and his brothers for most of this, and he did not like them. Curly Bill had killed a marshal and was staying clear of Tombstone for a time. But Ringo still came regularly. He seemed to consider himself a champion of the outlaws, and Wyatt Earp the champion of the law and order crowd. One witness, writing about it later, said: "Everybody in Tombstone looked for a gunfight every time Ringo rode into town. He would swagger up and down Allen Street, two ivory-handled guns buckled around his waist. In winter he wore a huge shaggy buffalo-skin overcoat, with a six-shooter in each pocket. Any time he saw an Earp on the street he would stride past and stare them in the eye, as though daring them to say a wrong word." There was another band of rustlers working in Cochise County, the Clantons and the McLowerys. They also hated the Earps and would one day participate in the famous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, a battle that did not involve Ringo. On one particular day in Tombstone, the three Earps and Doc Holliday stood in front of Bob Hatch's saloon chatting with the mayor of Tombstone. Across the street before the Grand Hotel were the Clantons and the McLowerys. Ringo happened along and had an inspiration.

He confronted Marshal Earp with a proposition. Since they hated one another, there was certain to be a showdown some day soon. So why not now? Ringo dared Earp to come out into the middle of the street and shoot it out. Earp thought Ringo was either drunk or crazy. Either way, he refused to rise to the bait and went back inside the saloon with his brothers. Doc Holliday remained, watching Ringo with a cold killer's smile. It was a well-known fact that Holliday was the deadliest gunfighter and the bravest of the Earp crowd. So Ringo turned to him, taking a handkerchief from his pocket. He challenged Holliday to a handkerchief duel. In this sort of duel, each man takes a corner of the handkerchief in one hand and steps back to the end of it, usually about three feet. Then, at the word, each man goes for his gun. At such short range, of course, it is almost impossible to miss. This was the bloodiest of all gun duels and often resulted in both men being killed. To accept such a challenge took an icy courage few men possess. Doc Holliday accepted the challenge without hesitation. But the duel did not take place; Mayor Thomas stepped between them to stop it. Ringo had to walk away, a frustrated man. What made John Ringo so fearless? Various reasons have been given for his reckless courage. The one with probably the most validity has it that Ringo had a strong drive toward suicide, he deliberately courted death every day of his life. Especially when drunk, he hated himself for what he had become. And if a man courts death, why should he fear it? In view of the controversy surrounding his death, this theory is possibly correct. Many of the western outlaws were cowards. A number of the famed killers of the Old West shot as many men from ambush, in the back, as they did face to face. Yet for others it was a matter of honor to appear fearless, even if they were quaking with terror inside. They had the image of the fearless badman to maintain. Since Ringo was quite conscious of this image, it likely goaded him into deadly situations. Doc Holliday is also credited with being an absolutely fearless gunfighter. But he was dying of tuberculosis and knew it, so death held few fears from him. Ironically, Doc Hoiliday lived through all the violence and bloodshed and died peacefully in bed, one of the few western badmen to do so. Ringo had several confrontations with the Earps. One of these became known as Ringo's Victory at the Charleston bridge. This episode also reveals, strangely enough, how he always kept his word to the letter. Shortly after his face-to-face challenge to Wyatt Earp in Tombstone, Ringo and another man robbed a poker game in a saloon in Galeyville. Both men had played in the game since morning. At midnight they were broke. They left the game, got their horses and returned to rob the game of five hundred dollars. Ringo had followed this pattern before, but his victims usually laughed it off, afraid to do anything, so Ringo expected no repercussions. Shortly he was back in Galeyville and was astonished when Deputy Breakenridge arrived to serve him with a warrant for armed robbery. Ringo was indignant that his poker-playing friends had lost their sense of humor. Breakenridge was in a hurry to return to Tombstone, but Ringo had some business to settle. He told the deputy to return to Tombstone, and he would follow the instant his affairs were concluded. Breakenridge went on his

way, detouring to attend to some law business. The following day he started back to Tombstone. He kept expecting Ringo to catch up with him. Noon passed, and there was no sign of Ringo. Breakenridge experienced some misgivings about his judgment. Aside from the fact that all of Tombstone would have the horse laugh on him for allowing an outlaw like Ringo free on just his word, he knew that Sheriff Behan would be furious. But Ringo caught up with the deputy before he reached Tombstone. He had ridden all night to keep his promise. That evening, in Sheriff Behan's office in Tombstone, a lawyer, Ben Goodrich, came to post bail for Ringo. From the attorney Ringo learned that Curly Bill Brocius was accused of robbing a stage at Robber's Roost all by himself. The Earps knew that Curly Bill was in Charleston, and they planned to capture him the following day. Ringo realized that his friend would doubtless be drunk right now on the proceeds of the holdup, easy prey for the Earps. Meanwhile, Wyatt Earp had learned that Ringo was in jail. With Ringo locked up, Earp calculated that the capture of Curly Bill would be easy. He obtained a promise from the district attorney that Ringo would be kept in jail twenty-four hours without bail. But Sheriff Behan had akeady released Ringo on bail, and he was on his way to Charleston. Again he rode all night. Around noon the next day Wyatt Earp, his brother, Virgil, and Doc Holliday rode out of the hills above the San Pedro River and arrived at the bridge across from Charleston. At the approach to the bridge, they reined up in astonishment. On the opposite side of the bridge, John Ringo stood with a rifle pointed at them. He invited them to cross at their peril. They held a brief conference. With the surprising appearance of Ringo, they assumed that Curly Bill had been warned and had fled. Even if not, they knew one, or perhaps all three, would probably die if they attempted to storm the bridge. They chose discretion over valor, waved goodbye to Ringo, acceding him the victory at Charleston bridge, and rode off. In Tombstone, Sheriff Behan appeared in the district court. The judge wanted to take up the matter of Ringo's bail. When the sheriff informed him that Ringo was already free on bail, the judge was furious, telling Sheriff Behan that the district attorney had refused bail for the outlaw. He further informed Behan that if Ringo did not appear in court the following day, the court would hold Behan personally responsible. Word of Behan's plight reached Charleston. Curly Bill and Ringo decided that it was their fault Sheriff Behan was in a bind. It was their responsibility to do something. The next day Sheriff Behan appeared in court without John Ringo. In the middle of a tongue-lashing by the judge, Ringo walked into the courtroom with Deputy Breakenridge, embarrassing the judge, but gratifying a highly relieved Sheriff Behan. Since it might seem to some, at this point, that John Ringo was far above the sordid activities of other western badmen, perhaps the story of what happened in Skeleton Canon might help to place him in a better perspective. Skeleton Canon winds through the Peloncillo MountaMs from the Animas Valley

in New Mexico to the San Simon Valley in Arizona. In the 1880's the Animas Valley was a hangout for outlaws. Curly Bill had a ranch there where he held stock he had rustled. A Mexican, one Don Miguel Garcia, often brought a pack train loaded with Mexican silver up from Mexico to buy trade goods in Tucson. He would exchange the silver for the goods, slip back across the border without paying customs duty and profit greatly. On one particular day he led a train of laden mules through Skeleton Canon. He had nineteen men with him. Halfway through the canon, the train was ambushed by a dozen outlaws lying on the canon walls. The ambushers were Curly Bill's men, with John Ringo second in command. When the bloody massacre was over, nineteen Mexicans lay dead. One, a youth of sixteen, escaped to tell the tale. The outlaws went among the dead and wounded strewn along the canon floor, ordered by Ringo to shoot anyone who was still breathing. Then they rounded up the mules and divided up $75,000 in Mexican silver. This was good for weeks of debauchery in Galeyville and Charleston before John Ringo managed to win much of the silver away from the outlaws at cards. There were other incidents of a like nature in which Ringo slaughtered and robbed right along with the other members of the cutthroat crew. He participated in all such murderous raids without reservation and with gusto. Cochise County and Tombstone were growing more peaceful now. Wyatt Earp and his men reportedly killed Curly Bill because they suspected the outlaw leader of killing Morgan Earp and wounding Virgil. There were some conflicting stories about this. Some said that the Earps did not kill Curly Bill, that he went down into Mexico. For whatever reason, Curly Bill was never seen again around Tombstone. And not too long after that, the Earps and Doc Holliday left Tombstone. To many the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral was a slaughter, instead of the fair gunfight the Earps claimed it was, the Clantons and the McLowerys shot down like dogs. But, again, whatever the truth about the gunfight, the Earps came in for strong criticism around Tombstone, and soon left. But then Wyatt Earp always followed the booms. He had left Dodge City as the city's boom began to ebb, and he may have foreseen the impending decline of Tombstone. It was also the beginning of the end for John Ringo. Following Curly Bill's death or disappearance, he remained in Galeyville and Charleston, but most of the gang had drifted away or been killed. Ringo spent his time gambling and drinking heavily, growing steadily more morose. He also made frequent appearances in Tombstone, free to do pretty much as he pleased now that Wyatt Earp was gone. On one hot day in July in 1882 he embarked on a ten-day drinking bout. His drinking companions were Buckskin Frank Leslie, a bartender and part-time badman around Tombstone, and Billy Claibourne. Both men later reported that Ringo was more despondent than they had ever seen him, threatening suicide with almost every breath. A few days later Ringo rode out of Tombstone with two bottles of whiskey in his pocket. Leslie and Claibourne followed shortly and the trio met again in Antelope Springs, nine miles out of Tombstone, and continued their drinking spree in Jack McCann's saloon. A couple of days later a man named Bill Sanders met Ringo riding alone near a chain of water holes called the Tanks. Sanders reported later that Ringo was blind drunk. Three miles farther on Sanders met Buckskin Frank Leslie, who seemed reasonably sober. Leslie inquired after Ringo. When Sanders told him where he'd seen Ringo,

Leslie rode hard in that direction. Deputy Breakenridge also encountered Ringo that day. He tried to get the outlaw to ride with him to the Goodrich Ranch. Ringo, drunk and stubborn, refused and rode on his way. Evidently Breakenridge was the last person to see Ringo alive. At the mouth of West Turkey Creek Canon, sometimes called Morse's Canon, stood Coyote Smith's ranch house. Across the creek and some distance from the ranch house was a great live oak. The oak grew in a rather unusual formation. It had a short, stump-like central trunk from which sprouted five other trunks, each as thick as an ordinary tree. The tree was green all the year round. On the ground, held in position by the five trunks, was a large rock which formed a rough seat. Many travelers nooned under the shadowy coolness of the giant oak. Around noon of the day Ringo was last seen alive, Coyote Smith's wife heard a single shot from the direction of the tree. She thought someone had shot a deer and dismissed it. A teamster, stopping at the tree for lunch the following day, found John Ringo dead, a single bullet hole in his head. He was seated on the flat rock, head fallen onto his chest. His six-shooter was in his right hand, the hammer resting on an empty shell. The other five chambers were unfired. His coat, boots and horse were missing, and portions of his underwear were bound around his bare feet. Clearly he had not been robbed, since his other personal possessions were on him. It would seem that Ringo had finally carried out his threat and killed himself. A coroner's jury was convened on the spot and officially declared his death a suicide. He was buried under the live oak, and the grave can still be viewed there. There was a report that one of Ringo's sisters had the body exhumed and shipped to California. Oldtimers swear that he still lies there. But was it suicide? Opinion at the time was sharply divided. Many people believed he was murdered by Buckskin Frank Leslie. There were rumors, never officially confirmed, that Leslie boasted around Tombstone of killing Ringo. One witness who viewed Ringo's body before he was buried said there were no powder burns around the wound in his temple; therefore it could not have been suicide. So John Ringo remains an enigma even in death. Ringo has a further distinction not granted to other western badmen. It is said that Ringo's ghost walks up and down under the old live oak at night. For years after his death many people refused to go near the tree at night. Even today, some familiar with the ghost legend will not venture by the tree after dark. It would seem that Ringo's death was a signal for the death of a town. The Tombstone mines closed down in 1883. Within six weeks Tombstone dwindled from a town of 6,500 people down to 2,000. By 1900 there were only some six hundred people still living there, and it was in danger of becoming a ghost town. Then a new boom struck Tombstone, if of a different nature. The Bird Cage Theatre still operates in Tombstone, a city that has been

converted into a Disneyland of the old West at the cost of several million dollars. The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral still takes place in Tombstone for the entertainment of the tourist-with actors firing blank cartridges. If John Ringo's ghost does indeed haunt the old oak tree, one must wonder with what horror he views what has happened to the "toughest town in the southwest." JOHN WESLEY HARDIN : DEADLIEST GUN OF THEM ALL by Gary Brandner The Acme Saloon on El Paso's brawling San Antonio Street looked in 1895 much the way it had twenty years earlier in the lawless days following the Civil War. It was the end of the frontier era, but El Paso, in the far western tip of Texas, was still a town of gamblers, gunfighters, and girls of easy virtue. On a hot August night in that year a man named Henry Brown stood at the bar under the light of the hanging coal-oil lamps and rolled the dice. His companion was a slim, sandy-haired man in his early forties with ice-blue eyes and a heavy moustache. This was John Wesley Hardin, the grimmest gunman ever to come out of Texas. He had less than an hour to live. Wes Hardin's life began in Bonham, Texas, in 1853. He was the son of a minister. Wes was eight years old when the Civil War began, and by the time he reached his teens the Confederate cause had drained Texas of its young men. With the end of the war came an influx of Northerners eager to prey on the defeated South. These were the hated "carpetbaggers," a contemptuous Southern term implying that all they owned was carried in their hand luggage of heavy carpeting. The Texas State Police under the postwar administration was liberally sprinkled with carpetbaggers and freed slaves. They quickly earned the hatred of bitter young men like Wes Hardin. When he was fifteen Hardin shot and killed a black state policeman. It was the first of many notches in the gun of John Wesley Hardin. The young killer lit out with the police and Union soldiers after him. He set up an ambush for the pursuers, killed three soldiers, and got away. He then threw in with Simp Dixon, one of many outlaw relatives Hardin had scattered over east Texas. The posse caught up with them in Richland Bottoms, but Hardin and his cousin were able to shoot their way out of the trap, each killing a man in the process. Wes Hardin had now killed five men. And he had just turned sixteen. After the escape from Richland Bottoms Hardin split up with his cousin and became a professional gambler. This was essentially his only means of livelihood for the rest of his life. In the town of Towash Hardin got into an argument with another gambler named Amos Bradley, who rashly claimed Wes was dealing from the bottom of the deck. For one of the few times in his life Hardin was beaten to the draw, and Bradley shoved a derringer into the boy's stomach and pulled the trigger. These little guns were a gambler's favorite. They sold for about eight dollars, and fired a .41-caliber bullet. The derringer's effective range was only 15 or 20 feet, but across a poker table it was deadly. This one misfired, and Bradley never got a second chance. Hardin's .45 blew a hole in his throat.

Moving on to Horn Hill, Wes Hardin--gambler, gunfighter, and killer--reverted briefly to the boy he actually was. He went to the circus, sneaking in under the tent as have many youngsters before and since. And like many another youngster, Wes was caught by a guard and marched back outside. Here the comparison ends. As soon as he was free of the guard's grasp Hardin whirled and shot the man dead before the astonished eyes of the crowd. He left town at a gallop, and did not stop until he reached Kosse, a hundred miles away. He was still only sixteen, but Wes Hardin's boyhood was over. In Kosse he went looking for the loudest saloon with the fastest poker game and the most available women. It was one of the latter that caused him trouble. A man named Alan Comstock felt he had a prior claim on the woman Hardin picked out for himself. Jealousy ate at Comstock until finally he went looking for the kid who had taken his woman. Hardin was expecting him, and when Comstock burst through the door of his room, the kid shot him through the right eye. Wes traveled next to Waco where he argued with a barber named Huffman over the purchase of a horse. Feeling he had got the worst of it, Huffman drank himself into a rage and went after the kid. Hardin was in a saloon dealing cards when the barber lurched in. He immediately eased the big .45 out of its holster and laid it in his lap. Huffman stood at the bar, some 12 feet away from Hardin and shouted at him, finally groping for his gun in a clumsy draw. Before he had his iron free of leather the young gunman drilled him through the stomach. The barber died 36 hours later. Hardin fled Waco with a posse again not far behind. He managed to elude them, but was captured by the sheriff in Longview. The sheriff deputized a pair of local toughs, a jailhouse bully named Stokes and a halfbreed named Smolly, to take the outlaw back to Waco for trial. While in the Longview jail, however, Hardin managed to buy a smuggled .45 with four cartridges in the cylinder. It was wintertime when they rode out, and Hardin was able to hide the gun in his waistband under the heavy overcoat. Once the trio was outside of town Smolly suggested they shoot the prisoner and go back and tell the sheriff he made a break for it. Stokes, however, had scruples and balked at cold-blooded murder. With Hardin tied on his horse they rode southwest, swimming their horses across the Sabine River among floating chunks of ice. On the second night they made an open camp on the snow-covered ground. Stokes went to a nearby farm to get corn for the horses, leaving Smolly alone with Hardin, who was untied while in camp. The gunman maneuvered behind Smolly and pulled out the smuggled .45. At this point, according to Hardin's own account, he yelled at Smolly to turn around. And maybe he did. The old gunfighters did have their own rules about backshooting, though they were not always followed. However it happened, Smolly took three of the four slugs from Hardin's .45. The fourth misfired. Hardin then helped himself to Smolly's gun and cartridge belt, saddled the best horse, and rode leisurely off, confident that Stokes would not give chase without a posse. The young gunman's plan was to head for Mexico by way of San Antonio and Laredo. However, he hadn't gone far when he met three state policemen waiting for him with drawn guns. They disarmed Hardin and began the ride back to Waco. That night they made camp in bush country, and because they outnumbered the outlaw three to one the policemen didn't bother to keep him shackled. They

even let him sleep between two of the officers named Smith and Davis while the third, Ellis, took the first guard watch. Wes Hardin pretended to sleep as Smith and Davis unbuckled their gunbelts and stacked a shotgun and two rifles with their saddles. He watched through slitted eyes while these two crawled under their blankets and went to sleep. At about midnight Ellis's head began to nod. Gathering himself, Hardin sprang up from between the sleeping guards and seized the shotgun from the stacked arms. As Ellis snapped awake Hardin cut him in two with a blast from the first barrel. He swung the weapon on the slowly awakening sleepers and with the second barrel blew Davis to eternity. Snatching up Ellis's six-shooter, Hardin finished off Smith. In no hurry now, he picked the best of the rifles, saddles, and horses and rode off to join his outlaw cousins, the Clements, who had a ranch near Gonzales. These Clements--Jim, Manning, Gyp, and Joe--were killers all who shared Wes's hatred of the state police. They invited their cousin to join them in a cattle drive up the old Chisolm Trail to Abilene. Hardin took them up on it, figuring Kansas was as good a place as Mexico to lie low while things cooled off in Texas. Before they got underway Hardin rode into Gonzales for a little action. He won a bundle at poker, then lost it at monte. He decided the Mexican dealer was a cheat, and slapped him across the face with his left hand while going for his gun with the right. The bullet caught the dealer under the rib cage and came out just below his left shoulder blade. The town marshal, knowing Hardin was a cousin of the formidable Clements, made no move to arrest him. Gonzales was a town where the shooting of a Mexican monte dealer could be overlooked in the general hubbub. The cattle drive north was uneventful, except for the shooting of a couple of Indians by Hardin when they tried to levy a tax on the cows being driven over their land. In those days the killings of Indians, Negroes, and Mexicans were not even added to a gunfighter's score. This was not racial bias so much as recognition that such victims were usually poorly armed and unskilled in gun handling. Things continued calmly then until they reached Newton Prairie where another herd moved up, crowding the Clements from behind. These cattle were the long-legged, mean-tempered longhorns, not the placid herefords of today. It didn't take much to spook these beasts into a stampede, something all cowboys dreaded. Hardin rode back to the following trail boss, a man named Jose Guzman, and suggested he hold up his herd. Guzman did not like Hardin's tone nor his words, and opened up on him with a .44-caliber Henry rifle. When the rifle jammed Guzman drew his six-shooter and galloped at Hardin, firing as he came. On this occasion Hardin was poorly armed. He carried an old cap-and-ball .36 Navy Colt that was in poor repair. To keep the chambers in alignment he had to grip the cylinder with his hand. Firing in this clumsy manner Hardin managed to hit the trail boss in the thigh, giving him time to get another gun and do the job right. The cattle were delivered to Abilene without further mishap. Hardin and the Clements had been a hundred days on the trail, and they were rip-roaring ready for some fun. And Abilene was ready to provide it. Plenty of booze and babes and games of chance waited in the prairie city for the lusty trail hands eager to spend their pay. But in spite of all the hell-raising, lawlessness was kept to a minimum in Abilene by the man who was the marshal--Wild Bill Hickok. Wild Bill strictly enforced the ordinance against shooting off guns in town, even if he had to kill a man to do it.

In Wes Hardin's autobiography he tells of an encounter with Wild Bill when the marshal tried to disarm the outlaw. He unholstered his guns, says Hardin, and offered them butt-first to the lawman, keeping his forefingers hooked under the trigger guards. When Hickok reached for the weapons Hardin wheeled the barrels forward, letting the butts smack into his hands in the "border roll." It is doubtful that Wild Bill would have fallen for a trick like this, and even more doubtful that Hardin with the drop on Hickok would have refrained from killing him. Nevertheless, that's the way Wes says it was, and it could have happened. Though he never faced Hickok in a showdown, the eighteen-year-old Wes Hardin managed to get into mischief aplenty in Abilene. He spent a lot of time with the floozies at the Drover's Cottage and in the card game down at the Bull's Head Saloon. At the Bull's Head a man named Tatum made the mistake of reaching across a poker table to slap the skinny looking lad during an argument. The six-shooter in Hardin's lap roared under the table, shooting Tatum in the thigh and severing the femoral artery. The man bled to death in twenty minutes. Figuring he was now in big trouble if Wild Bill came to investigate the gunfire, Hardin lit out for the Clements camp at Cottonwood. From there he joined up with a posse chasing a killer named Pablo Gutierrez. They caught up with the fugitive at Bluff, Kansas, where Hardin shot and killed him. Thinking that this public service would even things up for the killing of Tatum, he rode back into Abilene where, sure enough, Wild Bill chose to ignore him. But John Wesley Hardin could not stay out of trouble for long. Asleep one night in the Drover's, he was awakened by a thief quietly going through his clothes. Hardin slipped the .45 from beneath his pillow and shot the thief through the neck at close range. Remembering the anti-gunfire ordinance, Hardin rushed to the window just in time to see Wild Bill pull up with four other men in a hack. Not pausing to retrieve his pants, which had fallen under the dead man, Hardin scrambled through the window, dropped to the alley below, and ran pantless for the city limits. He got a ride with a passing cowboy back to the Clements camp, and never again went into Abilene. The outlaw rode back into Texas where he had a run-in with a pair of state policemen at a trading post. While one officer waited outside the other covered Hardin and demanded his six-shooter. Again Hardin offered his gun butt-first and executed the border roll. This time, more in character, Wes finished the trick by shooting the policeman in the face. The second lawman took off at the sound of the shot, having no doubt that it was his fellow officer and not Wes Hardin who had gone down. A posse trailed Hardin for three days after this shooting. He finally lay in ambush for them, possibly with help from the Clements, and three of the possemen were killed, discouraging further pursuit. At this point in his life, in spite of being a wanted killer with a fistful of warrants out for him, John Wesley Hardin fell in love and married. Little is known of his bride other than her name, Jane, and the fact that she died childless while Wes was in prison. They bought a small place near Gonzales and Wes had a shot at farming and ranching on a small scale. It was during this time, possibly to relieve the boredom of domestic life, that Hardin developed his holster-vest. At the end of the Civil War men of both armies carried their revolvers in flap-top holsters, butt to the front, on the right side of their waistbelt.

A more awkward position for a quick draw would be hard to devise. The Army draw was made with the back of the hand against the side, bringing the gun out with a lift-twist that swiveled the barrel up and across the stomach. After the war the young veterans continued for a time to carry their guns this way, though they did dispose of the cumbersome holster flaps. Before long it was discovered that reversing the guns so the butts pointed back made for a more natural draw. Gunfighters then began dropping the holsters lower on their legs so the butt rested nearer the hanging hand. Others used the cross-draw, keeping the guns at waist level, butt forward, but reaching across the body to draw with the opposite hand instead of using the wrist-wrenching Army draw. Northern gunfighters generally preferred the cross-draw because in the colder climates where a coat was needed much of the time it was easier to yank out a gun from the left than to dig up under the coat skirt on the right. There were pistoleros who carried their weapons in shoulder holsters, pants-pocket holsters, even boot holsters. The rig Wes Hardin is credited with inventing was a calfskin vest with a leather lined pocket on each side to hold a pair of short-barreled .41s with the butts pointing in, nestled against the lower ribs. Wearing this outfit under a coat Hardin could draw from an innocent looking folded-arm position, giving him the double advantage of speed and surprise. It wasn't long before the holster-vest got a workout. Hardin tired of farming and hit the saddle for Kingsville and the lower Rio Grande country. In the brush land south of San Antonio a Mexican with robbery on his mind rode into Hardin's camp. Suspicious of the man from the start, Hardin deliberately took off his gunbelt and hung it up with the weapon still holstered. Thinking he had the advantage, the Mexican went for his gun and Hardin whipped out a vest-pocket .41 and killed him. Some months later back in Gonzales Wes Hardin, for one of the few times in his life, came out second best in a gunfight. A game of ten-pins with a man named Dudley Sublett led to a quarrel, a fistfight, and finally gun play. Subtett took a .41 slug in the shoulder, but Hardin was shot through the body. The Clements hustled him out of town, but the news that Hardin was badly wounded seemed to inspire the state police to greater efforts to catch him. When they finally came upon his hideout two policemen advanced on Hardin with drawn guns. Hardin killed one of them and wounded the other, but one of their bullets shattered his knee. Wes would have died before letting the despised state police take him, but he agreed to surrender to Sheriff Dick Regan, a man he trusted. As Regan rode in to take the prisoner one of his possemen got nervous and fired his gun, hitting Hardin in the thigh. Regan loaded the shot-up gunfighter on a pallet in the back of a spring wagon for the trip to Austin where he was jailed. After some months he was returned to Gonzales to stand trial. By then Hardin had recovered from his three bullet wounds, and he bribed somebody--the jailer or the local sheriff--to let him escape. He hadn't been free long before Hardin went on another drinking spree in another saloon and killed another man--this one an old antagonist named Pat Morgan. Sheriff Jack Helms came after Hardin, and instead of running this time Wes waited for the sheriff and killed him. This brought Brown County Deputy Sheriff Charley Webb into the action. Webb and Hardin had supported different sides in the bitter Texas feud

between the Sutton and Taylor families. This probably had as much to do with Webb's determination as did any thought of avenging Sheriff Helms. He followed Hardin to the town of Comanche, vowing to bring the outlaw back in irons or in a box. In the Ace of Diamonds Saloon the two came together. Hardin, apparently unarmed, spoke a few words to Webb, then turned to order a drink. Webb reached for his gun, and Bud Dixon, another of Hardin's endless supply of no-good cousins, shouted a warning. Hardin jumped aside as the deputy's bullet grazed his ribs. He drew from his holster-vest and killed Webb with a single shot. This would be the killing for which Wes Hardin was at last convicted. Things finally became too hot in Texas, and Hardin left his home state for stops in Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida. He lived under the name of John Adams and did a little farming, bought and sold several saloons, and gambled. If Hardin killed anybody during his three years away from Texas, nobody knows about it. Hardin was tracked down by Lt. John Armstrong of the Texas Rangers, which had replaced the discredited state police. With the help of Dallas detective John Duncan, Armstrong traced Hardin to a little town in Alabama. There they discovered that the gunman and some of his friends were headed for Pensacola. Armstrong arranged for the Pensacola police to be waiting with him and Duncan when Hardin's train arrived at a watering stop just outside the city. The plan was for Armstrong to enter the front of Hardin's coach and throw down on him while the Florida officers rushed in from the rear. Detective Duncan was to stand on the platform and reach through the window to grab Hardin's gun arm. Things didn't work out according to plan. For one reason or another the Pensacola police failed to make their entrance at the rear of the coach, and Duncan never got close to Hardin's window. This left Lt. Armstrong to face five armed men by himself. When he swung into the coach Hardin immediately recognized the .45 with the 7-inch barrel as a Texas weapon, and went for his own gun. This day Hardin was not wearing the holster-vest, and had his six-shooter stuck in his waistband. As he pulled at the gun the hammer caught in his suspenders, getting more firmly entangled the harder Wes yanked at it. Meanwhile, one of Hardin's companions drew and fired at Armstrong, missing. The Ranger dropped him with a bullet through the heart. Armstrong then rushed at Hardin, who was still tugging frantically at his revolver, and bashed him over the head with the barrel of his .45. Hardin went down and out. When Armstrong turned his gun toward the remaining three men they dropped their weapons and raised their hands. This time Wes Hardin was in custody for keeps. He was tried in Comanche with the Texas Rangers on hand to discourage any attempt by his relatives to free him. The jury found him guilty and he was sent to Huntsville Prison. After serving 20 years of a 25-year sentence he was pardoned by the governor. Hardin tried to return to Gonzales, but he saw that old enmities still simmered there that could easily get him into a fight and back to prison. He headed for El Paso, a tough, wide-open honkytonk town that fit Wes Hardin like a glove. He took up there with a big blonde known as Mrs. McRose. No delicate prairie flower was Mrs. McRose. She liked to drink and gamble as well as

Wes. Their life together rocked along without major mishap until the middle of August, 1895. About that time Wes made a trip down to Pecos, and while he was gone Mrs. McRose got liquored up and had herself a good time out on the street shooting at signs, storefronts, and an occasional passerby. She was arrested, cuffed around a little, and tossed into the city jail by Young John Selman, an El Paso policeman. He was called Young John to distinguish him from Old John Selman, his father and a tough old buzzard who had weathered many a gunfight himself. When Hardin returned to El Paso he was boiling mad at the treatment of his lady. Although at 42 he was beginning to have middle-age doubts about his gun handling skills, he let it be known that he was ready to kill Young John Selman and his father to boot if the old man interfered. On the night of August 19, Wes ran into Old John outside the Acme Saloon. He told the old man that his son would have to answer for his treatment of Mrs. McRose, though Wes added that he was unarmed at the time. Hardin probably meant the first part of his statement, but the last was a lie, for under his coat he wore the famous holster-vest with a pair of loaded .41s. Hardin walked on into the saloon and ordered drinks for himself and an acquaintance, Henry Brown. The two men called for the dice and rolled them on the bar. According to Henry Brown's later testimony, the last mortal words of John Wesley Hardin were, "Four sixes to beat..." Old John Selman walked into the saloon behind Hardin. He glided up to within arm's length, then pulled out his .45 and shot the Texas gunman in the back of the head. As Hardin crumpled to the floor Selman put two more bullets into the body. At the trial Old John Selman's was the only testimony that claimed he was facing Hardin at the time he fired. The coroner found that all three bullets had entered from the rear, and that's the way the other witnesses saw it. Still, Hardin's threats against the Selmans, plus his reputation as a gunfighter and killer were enough to sway the jury. Old John Selman was acquitted to be gunned down not long afterward himself. The actual number of men he killed will never be known for sure, but they number somewhere between thirty and forty, making John Wesley Hardin the deadliest gun of them all.

BEN THOMPSON : THE TEXAS TERROR by Arthur Moore The brawling, sprawling Texas of the mid-nineteenth century was rich in living legends of gamblers and gunfighters. Gambling was as respected an occupation as store-tending or any other frontier calling. Gunslinging was respectable depending on which side of the law a man found himself, and the gunslinger was respected in direct proportion to his ability. Ben Thompson combined a talent at cards and dice with a marvelous skill in handling a pistol to become one of the most famous and feared gunfighters of his time. His reputation was well-earned and widespread. His friends claimed he was loyal and could be counted on when he was needed; his enemies called him a coldblooded killer. No one disputed his courage and coolness in the face of danger.

Thompson was born in 1842 and grew up in the area where he later made his name. There's some question as to whether he was actually born in Texas, but his family moved to Austin when Ben was still a young child. Austin in 1850 was an outpost of civilization. It was a dusty little town of dirt streets and clapboard or mud and shake houses, many with hard-packed dirt floors and oiled paper windows. Wagons and buckboards rode with armed guards or escorts when they ventured outside of town. Apaches and the dreaded Comanches roamed the countryside in constant lookout for guns and horses. The Indians often swooped down on settlers and even raided houses on the outskirts of Austin. These were frontier times and people were guided by a very practical set of mores. When danger threatened, a man went for his gun and did his own fighting. Women and children fought when necessary. No one thought of calling the law or suing a Comanche war party in court. Ben Thompson got into his first shooting scrape when he was fifteen. It started as a fist fight, but the other boy was bigger and Ben got the worst of it. Bloody and beaten, he ran home for something that would even the odds--his single barreled shotgun. When he returned, the older and wiser lad headed for the horizon but stopped some birdshot along the way. He recovered, but Ben was freed and warned about using his gun for such purposes. As a boy in his teens, Ben was expected to contribute to the support of his family. His first job was distributing type in a newspaper office. He went on to work as a typesetter in print shops and newspaper offices for a number of years. He might have done well in this occupation except for two things. One was the considerable natural skill he had with guns and his quickness to use them in settling arguments. The other was that somewhere along the trail in his early years he also discovered the pleasures and excitement of gambling. Cards were more fascinating than the newspaper office and promised richer rewards. Ben soon gave up his job and became a full time gambler, a vocation he followed the rest of his life. And gambling gave young Thompson plenty of opportunity to practice his marksmanship. By the time he was in his early twenties his reputation had begun to grow. He was well aware of his prowess and he took advantage of it. He never backed down from a fight and he often went looking for trouble. He never hesitated to kill if his adversary was armed, since to hesitate could cost a gunman his life. Despite modern television and the movies, gunmen of the early West never shot guns out of an enemy's hand. To do so would be soft-hearted or stupid. Ben Thompson was neither. He feared nothing. One of his most remarkable traits was his courage and steadiness under fire. When the odds against him were greatest he seemed at his calmest. Of himself, Thompson said: "l always make it a rule to let the other fellow fire first. If a man wants a fight I argue the question with him and try to show him it is foolish. If he can't be dissuaded, why the fun begins, but I let him have first crack. Then when I fire, you see, I have the verdict of self defense on my side, for he is pretty certain in his hurry to miss, and I never do." Ben's enemies claimed this statement had a high manure content and was strictly for publication. There were, they said, instances when the dead man at Ben's feet had not fired his weapon at all. But even so, there was some truth in Ben's words and they were clear evidence of his calm approach

to snuffing out another's life. When the Civil War broke out in 1861 young Ben turned his enthusiasms to a new cause. He went to San Antonio and enlisted in the cavalry of the Confederate Army. At this time he was a young, blue-eyed lad with a strong jaw and thick black hair. Slender and well-built, he was a fine horseman as well as an expert marksman. As was common, he furnished his own horse and equipment. But his record with the Confederate States of America is in some doubt. Ben did not take well to discipline and his rebellion against it sometimes put him in the guardhouse. He smuggled whiskey and tobacco to fellow troopers; he gambled and entered into military life with the same boisterous exuberance that he had always felt as a civilian. He did nothing to distinguish himself as a soldier and he never came close to any of the great battles of the war. He was transferred to a cavalry regiment whose job it was to patrol the Mexican border. Riding along the sandy Rio Grande was dull work, with nothing to relieve the monotony. It didn't suit Ben at all. He wanted excitement and action. When the war didn't provide it, he made some of his own. He received permission to go to Laredo, which was a bustling town of stores, saloons and gambling halls just across the river in Old Mexico. The first thing he did was find himself a monte game with a crowd of Mexican soldiers. According to Ben's version of the story later, Lady Luck was riding with him and he won the soldiers' cash and when that ran out, their revolvers which were as good as money. Ben insisted the game was all fair and honest in true gambling style. The unhappy soldiers took a somewhat different view, and when Ben closed the proceedings and tried to leave with his winnings, they claimed the game had been crooked and demanded back guns and money. A soldier attempted to snuff out the candles to plunge the room in darkness. Ben started firing. His first shots dropped two of the yelling soldiers and started a panic toward the doors. Thompson plunged into the crowd and managed to escape in the confusion, but not without a few shots coming close enough to rip off his shirttails. Ben wisely vacated that part of the country quickly and joined a regiment under Colonel Beard at Austin which was trying to put down troublesome Indians. He was put in charge of recruiting a company of men for the fight, but the war ended before the regiment was sent out on its mission. Suddenly Ben Thompson found himself a civilian again. The great Civil War was over in the United States, but another rebellion was underway south of the border. While the attentions and armies of the North Americans had been focused on internal problems, Napoleon III of France took advantage of the southern, neighboring country and established an empire in Mexico. He put Archduke Maximilian of Austria, and his wife, Carlotta, on the newly-created and somewhat shaky throne. French speculators poured into Mexico to exploit its resources. With the end of the Civil War the United States began to look south and announced a readiness to enforce the Monroe Doctrine. The American President ordered the corrupt Imperial government to clear out of Mexico and sent battle veterans marching toward the border. Napoleon, already in trouble at home, did not have the means to support Maximilian--thousands of miles away. He invented a flimsy financial quarrel with the luckless

Maximilian and left him to face the music on his own. Maximilian chose to fight for his toppling throne. It was a most difficult fight. Maximilian was hardpressed for money and men. Mexicans everywhere were rising in revolt. The Emperor's agents hurried into Texas in an attempt to tap the reservoir of trained manpower of the now-defunct Confederate Army. These agents offered Confederate veterans gold if they would fight for Maximilian. Many southern soldiers had not surrendered, but merely turned around and gone home after General Lee gave up at Appomattox. Most had returned to find hardship at home; Texas was very poor and was now governed by a rag tag Union Army--not the battle veterans of the war. Some Texan hotheads were still bitter about the war and still full of frustration because it was now against the law to shoot Yankees. The Austrian's gold appealed to these as a way to solve several problems at the same time. Ben Thompson went south. He was given the rank of Lieutenant and entered into a far different and more dangerous life than he had known in the Confederate Army. Maximilian's war was bloody and vicious, with every man pressed constantly into battle. It was very unlike the dreary border patrols he'd ridden in Texas. He had the chance to fight, and fight he did. Maximilian himself is said to have remarked that no other officer in his service possessed Thompson's daring. But Ben was not in the war because of any belief in the Imperialist cause. And he did not change his way of thinking or acting. He continued to gamble and to try to line his own pockets. Once he and his men captured a wagon train of supplies and livestock and, instead of turning them over to the Emperor, headed them north to the Rio Grande and put them in the hands of a rancher with instructions for the man to sell the train and deposit the money to Ben's account in a San Antonio bank. The rancher agreed, but rode out of Ben's life forever. War is hell. When Maximilian was finally captured, tried and shot by the Mexican patriots in 1867, Ben Thompson fled to Vera Cruz and escaped. He eventually made his way home to Texas. In 1871, Ben turned up in the booming cow town of Abilene, Kansas. Abilene was the first of a long string of famous cow towns. It was the first Kansas railroad town to receive Texas longhorns which had been driven up the Chisholm Trail. The railroad had been built from St. Louis, through Sedalia, and on to the prairie. Beef could now be shipped east from the range lands. This idea helped change a nation. Abilene was a wide-open town, muzzle-full of gamblers and cowboys, primed with painted women, and loaded with buyers from the East with money to spend. Keeping any kind of law and order required a strong hand, and Wild Bill Hickok was appointed town marshal. James Butler Hickok was the most famous gunslinger alive at the time. He had a few years more to live. In Abilene, Ben and another gambler, Phil Coe, opened the Bull's Head Saloon. It did well and so did the owner's gambling interests. The only thorn in Ben's side was the town marshal. First off, Hickok was a Yankee which put him and Ben at odds. Too, Hickok took his job seriously and often interfered in disputes that Ben felt he had no business in. Ben raged that Hickok was a strutting Yankee who was pushing Texas cowboys around... which was partly true. He urged John Wesley Hardin, called Little Seven-Up,

another notorious gambler and gunslick, to shoot Hickok. Hardin, who had no part in the private feud between the two men, told Thompson to kill Hickok himself. But even Ben was not foolhardy enough to try. He left Abilene without killing anyone. Two years later he and his younger brother Billy were in Ellsworth, Kansas, where the cattle trade had shifted as the railroad built farther West. Ben took up gambling in the back room of Brennan's Saloon and did a thriving business. Unlike Abilene, Ellsworth's town marshal became a good friend of Thompson's. Sheriff Chauncey B. Whitney of Ellsworth County was also city marshal, and he handled complaints fairly. The most common "crimes" in a cow town were violations of drunk and disorderly or deadly weapons ordinances. For a man to shoot a signboard full of holes or fire a few letting-off-steam shots for the hell of it, might cost him a fine of ten dollars. To shoot someone who was shooting at him might cost nothing at all. These rules were flexible. A man on trial for murder was often permitted to wear his six-gun in court. He was innocent till proved guilty. The big difference was between an ordinary shooting scrape and murder. It was considered justifiable homicide to shoot a man who was armed and shooting back. Such killings might never to to trial. But to kill an unarmed man or to shoot or stab someone in the back was another matter--one that usually resulted in a very short trial and a long rope. Ben Thompson's trouble in Ellsworth came as a result of an argument over a gambling debt. Ben tipped off a gambler named Jonn Sterling that a third man needed a backer in a high-stakes game. Sterling promised Ben half his winnings in exchange, but when he pocketed a thousand dollars, Sterling walked out of the saloon and conveniently forgot the promise. Ben did not. He met Sterling in the street, ready to fight it out. The fracas attracted a good deal of attention, including Ben's brother, Billy, who came out of the saloon packing Ben's double-barreled shotgun. The gun went off, and the yelling began. Sheriff Whitney tried to quiet the disturbance. He actually got Ben to put up his pistol and return to Brennan's Saloon, but when someone shouted that Sterling and his pals were coming with guns, Billy whirled and fired. The buckshot caught Sheriff Whitney in the arm, shoulder and chest. He died of the injuries three days later. Ben got Billy out of town fast. Sheriff Whitney was well liked, a fact that a jury might consider more important than Billy's pleas of accidental shooting. Charges against Ben were dropped for his part in the affair, but Billy remained a wanted man. When he was finally tried, years later, he beat the rope on grounds that he had been shooting at someone else, not Whitney. Ben moved back to Austin and took up gambling again. But it was impossible for him to stay out of trouble. He butted into a quarrel between Mark Wilson, owner of the local Variety Theatre, and another man. The angry Wilson told Ben it was not his fight and to mind his own business. Ben did not take kindly to this and hot words were exchanged. Wilson armed himself with a shotgun and fired at Ben, but missed. Ben drew his pistol and killed Wilson. A bartender, trying to help Wilson, fired at Ben but only grazed his hip. Ben shot the man dead. Theatre patrons exited by doors and windows, tearing down scenery and drapes in their efforts to avoid slugs. The man who had started the trouble by arguing with Wilson was fined twelve dollars. A jury returned a verdict of not guilty on Ben Thompson. At this time Thompson was fairly well-to-do. He owned the Iron Front Saloon

on Congress Street and dressed in fashionable clothes, complete with plug hat and cane. He had a family and a fine home. But he was an adult delinquent. Sober, he was polite and gallant, especially toward women. He was a good talker, considered handsome, and had many friends in high places. With liquor in him, he was about as responsible as a slavering wolf among the sheep. In 1879, in a roaring mining camp in Leadville, Colorado, Ben got into a faro game and lost about three thousand dollars. He announced that he had been cheated, pulled his pistol and shot out the lights. The crowd scattered, whereupon Ben calmly picked up the cash from the table. He sauntered across the street to another bar and remarked that there seemed to be some disturbance across the way. Shortly after this he also put himself into the railroad war between the Santa Fe and the Rio Grande lines. The fight was over a strategic pass both companies needed. Ben did plenty of shooting, but also got himself thrown into jail. When the lines ran out of money, the war was over and Ben headed for Austin again. He took part in so many gunfights and shooting sprees and came out alive that he began to get the idea he was bulletproof. The myth spread that he was immune to lead poisoning and lived a charmed life. On at least one occasion he was persuaded to doff his coat and prove that he did not wear a steel vest. He was charged with some shootings that he vigorously denied. With his hotheadedness, it is more than likely he also got into fights and killed men he never talked about. He sometimes drank too much; he was fond of shooting out street lamps in Austin while in his cups. Wily he was never hunted dorm and killed by his enemies while he was drunk is a mystery. But it may well be that they considered him deadly dangerous. drunk or sober. Thompson had courage and was not afraid to face another man's gun. There were many eyewitnesses to his shootings, and even his worst eneinies never accused him of running away. In the Old West it was considered suicide to have it out with Ben Thompson. Bat Masterson, the famous gunslinger who managed somehow to City's Boot Hill and lived to become a New York City sports years, wrote of Thompson: "He killed many men but always in manly way. The men he shot and killed were men who tried to cheat Dodge writer in later an open and kill him."

Ben put on weight in middle age and became pale and flabby. He took to dressing in black and wearing silk hats, but he still loved a good fight. According to a newspaper story, a young eastern dude, wearing more shooting irons than necessary, showed up in Austin and announced he would ventilate any gent in a plug hat. Ben heard this, donned his top hat and went looking for the dude. When the easterner reached for his pistol, Ben pretended fright and begged for mercy. The dude drew, but Ben's pistol appeared like magic and bullets blasted the loudmouth off his pins. It was Thompson's kind of joke. As a gambling hall operator, Ben came in contact with many well-placed people. Some of them persuaded him to run for office, and he became marshal of Austin. The position seemed to settle him and he did not shoot up men or saloons for about a year. He was considered by many as one of the best marshals the town ever had. In his job as marshal, Ben went to San Antonio to bring back a wanted man.

While he was there he visited the Variety Theatre, a rowdy night spot on the main plaza, now run by one-armed Jack Harris, Billy Sims and Joe Foster. Thompson and Harris were enemies of long standing; Ben had once run Billy Sims out of town; he had once called Joe Foster a cheat and threatened to kill him. Jack Harris declared publicly that Ben Thompson was not welcome at the Variety, so of course Ben went there. The two men had words through an open window. Harris was packing a shotgun and when he raised it as if to fire, Ben shot him. Thompson was taken into custody when Harris died. Before the trial he resigned as marshal of Austin. The verdict was not guilty. Ben returned to Austin, but it was the beginning of the end. He was not the important man he once was. All he had !eft were his pistol and his temper. He drank heavily and, when he couldn't sleep at night, took to prowling the streets shooting out gas lights. The police avoided and ignored him whenever possible. He died with his boots on in San Antonio in 1884. It happened at the same Variety Theatre where he had killed Harris and was probably an offshoot of the first killing. Thompson and a friend, J. King Fisher, a gunman of no mean ability and then deputy sheriff of Uvalde County, went to the theatre to see the show. Sims and Foster were still operating the house since the death of Harris. Ben and Joe Foster got into an argument. Billy Sims and a special policeman named Jacob Coy were nearby. No one knows for sure how the gunplay started, but in its wake Coy was wounded, Foster was shot in the leg and later died of the wound, King Fisher and Ben Thompson fell dead. There was talk of ambush--and still is. A postmortem examination showed that Ben had been shot nine times! Five of the bullets were from different guns. Fisher had been shot thirteen times. So Ben Thompson died by violence, the way he had lived. He left nothing behind but a legend and a reputation, but he was an unusual product of a raw and unsettled age. He was a genuine part of the life and color of a time that can never exist again in the world. SAM BASS : ROBBER by Chet Cunningham President Rutherford B. Hayes had scarcely settled into his new quarters in the White House after his inauguration on March 4, 1877, when one of the slickest outlaws of the Old West pulled a six-gun in his first holdup--which turned out to be a total and complete disaster. Sam Bass was the man with the new, untried Colt .44. He stood only five feet eight inches and weighed 140 pounds. Like many men of his day he wore a carefully trimmed handlebar moustache. Sam and three men decided to rob the stage coach coming from Cheyenne, Wyoming, when it came within two miles of Deadwood in Dakota Territory. Joel Collins planned the robbery, and used Sam, Frank Towle and Little Reddy McKimmie. They would stop the stage, disarm the passengers, check and see what was in the strong box and relieve the passengers of anything of

value. The date was March 25, 1877. Everything went wrong from the start. They spotted the stage, got ready and even challenged it. But the man assigned to stop the horses, Frank Towle, didn't do his job. A shot was fired and the horses spooked, breaking into a run along the rough stage coach trail. McKimmie raised his shotgun and fired, killing the stage driver, Johnny Slaughter, who tumbled off the high seat. That was all the horses needed. They broke in panic and charged down the road at runaway speed, taking the $15,000 stored in the strong box with them. At last a passenger caught the reins and brought the stage into Deadwood. Sam Bass sat on his horse disgusted, and promised himself he would never make those mistakes again. Robert McKimmie was booted out of the gang for his stupid killing of the driver and the group expanded to include Jack Davis, Jim Berry, Tom Nixon and Bill Heftridge. The very next robbery the group tried was a success. They hit another stage, this one going from the mines into Deadwood. Sam hoped it would be loaded with Black Hills gold. No record was kept as to how the men split the loot--which turned out to be exactly seven dollars. Late in August of the same year the gang had made seven stage robberies, with $30 their biggest haul. It was then that they turned their attention to trains. Joel Collins was leader of the bandit band as it rode south deep into the state of Nebraska to Ogallala. A site was chosen, the water station at Big Springs, a few miles from Ogallala. Collins knew this area well from previous experience. Perhaps Collins had learned something from the success of Sitting Bull and his Sioux warriors at the Battle of the Little Big Horn the sumer before. This time the robbery was planned carefully, and carried out with precision. Number Four express on the Union Pacific line was due at the water tank at 10:48 on September 18, 1877. Thirty minutes before that time the six gang members entered the small station house and forced the agent, George Barnhart, to tear out the telegraph key and put out a red light on the tracks so the train would stop. When the train huffed to a halt, Collins and Heffridge ordered the engineer and the fireman down from the cab. The bandits bluffed their way into the express car and made their first big haul--S60,000 in newly minted 1877 twenty-dollar gold pieces in three wax-sealed wooden boxes. They tried to chop their way into the safe with an axe but couldn't get it open--and passed up another $200,000 worth of cash. As an afterthought, the men went through the passenger coaches robbing the travelers of another $1,300. It was the biggest haul that Sam Bass was ever to make himself or participate in. It was a fortune. They moved the train on down the tracks toward Ogallala, and rode to the South Platte fiver where they buried the loot. Two hours later they came into Ogallala trail-weary and looking for a drink. The town hardly noticed them, buzzing with talk of the train robbery. No suspicion came upon Sam or the men, so they returned to the cache and split the money, each man getting over $10,200.

Money was hard to come by in Nebraska during its first year of statehood, 1877. On the surrounding cattle ranches, cow punchers worked for $25 a month and board and room. All year a cowboy slaved for only $300. The Nebraska dirt farmers seldom saw $25 in cold cash money all in one piece. Yet six nondescript outlaws had just walked off with $10,200 each, more money than a cow puncher would earn in 33 years of riding the range! The men split up. Bass and Davis moved on south to Fort Worth, Texas, the area that Sam called home. Sam Bass did not look like the popular idea of an outlaw of the Old West. He was born July 21, 1851 on a farm near Mitchell, Indiana, one of ten children. His mother died when he was ten and his father three years later. When Sam was nineteen he went to Texas where he could satisfy his yearning to be a cowboy. Sam landed at Denton Creek ranch, fourteen miles from Denton, Texas and fifteen north of Fort Worth. After a year on the farm he moved into Denton because he liked the town life better, and got a job as stable hand at a hotel. In 1872 Denton was a village, a raw-boned, rough and rugged frontier town. Sam was on his own, out from under the harsh, unloving care of his uncle and ready to taste life. His new friends were rough. He acquired a taste for whiskey and gambling. Sam dressed carelessly, and often went a week without shaving. Some say he walked in a perpetual slouch. A modern psychiatrist would have a fine time with Sam Bass, pointing out his industrious and hard working parents, who were suddenly taken away, and the resulting insecurity which fell over him and lasted the rest of his life. A racehorse track in Denton soon caught Sam's fancy, and every Sunday he was there wagering with what little money he had. Soon he became so interested in racing that he scraped up money and with a partner bought a horse to race. Sam had quit the stable and begun work for William F. Egan on his 12 acre ranch near town. But soon Sam's racing activities took up so much of his time that Egan told Sam to quit racing or quit his job. Sam quit the job. He named the horse Jenny and she kept winning races. Soon Sam bought out his partner, and quickly the horse's fame spread. She became known as the Denton Mare and he raced all comers, winning all but one race. Sam began to get reckless, gambled with cards and drank heavily. Benton's rougher element seemed to be attracted to Sam. Later Sam and a new friend, Henry Underwood, took the Denton Mare into Indian Territory just to the north in what is now the state of Oklahoma. Sam raced and won against Indian horses, but the Choctaws and Cherokees refused to give up the horses they had wagered. Later that night Sam and some of his friends helped themselves to twice as many horses as the Indians had bet. The pair drove the animals to San Antonio and sold them. It was near the end of 1875 when Sam left Denton the next time. An argument on the street led to a rock throwing brawl as Sam and Henry Underwood began to beat up one of the men involved. The law was called and Sam and Henry got out of town just ahead of a posse. They continued to ride into

southwestern Texas. !n San Antonio, Sam met Joel Collins, a part-time cowboy who had been acquitted of murdering a man and who owned a bar. The pair threw in together. In the summer of 1876 Collins and Sam drove a herd of 700 cattle north toward Dodge City, Kansas. After selling the beef, squandering some of the money and being cheated out of the rest, the pair wound up in the rough and tumble mining center of Deadwood, Dakota Territory, and launched their crime spree with the abortive stage coach robbery. After the train robbery in Big Springs, Nebraska, the loosely formed gang split up. With more than ten thousand dollars in gold in his saddlebags, Sam headed back "home" to Fort Worth. Three of the men, Collins, Berry and Heftridge, were soon killed by lawmen tracking them down for the Big Springs robbery. But Sam seemed to be in the clear. He hit Fort Worth, then went to Denton where he found Henry Underwood and another former friend, Frank Jackson. The three decided to ride to San Antonio and spend some of Sam's ready cash. Friends warned them that they were being followed by a Pinkerton detective and two peace officers, so the trio changed plans and went to Fort Worth instead. Just to keep in practice, the three held up a stage on the way, but the Sam Bass luck was holding, and they earned only $43. A few weeks later Sam and Jackson held up another stage, and this time took over $400 and four gold watches. But Sam remembered the gold from the train, and began putting together a gang for rail robbery. Many changes were taking place in Texas during this time as well as in the United States. In 1877 a railroad workers strike began that was to spread nationwide. By July of 1877 a general strike halted the movement of all rail traffic. For a week U.S. army troops battled strikers until the strike was broken. In April, the southern Democrats agreed to support the republicans in congress to settle the Hayes-Tilden presidential election controversy if the Republicans would withdraw all federal troops from the south ending the Reconstruction era. A crazy instrument called the telephone came onto the scene and the first practical business telephone went into use between Boston and Somerville, Massachusetts. A young man called Thomas Alva Edison invented what he named the phonograph, and in fashionable Fort Worth drawing rooms there was talk that Tolstoy had published a new book, Anna Karenina. Dallas floundered along in the wake of these developments, striving to be a city with a smattering of culture. It boasted nearly 3,000 residents, but it was still a rough cow town, bred and raised by the six-gun and cattle punching, and with mud six inches deep on Main Street with every rain. During this time, Sam Bass went about his work in nearby Fort Worth assembling a new band of cutthroats. He selected Seaborn Barnes, who had been freed after a shooting when he was seventeen. Tom Spotswood, a four-time murderer, was also brought in. Sam picked a whistle stop north of Dallas as the ideal target for his next train robbery, the village of Allen. On February 22, 1878 Sam and his three men stopped the train with no

problems, but when they ordered the express car messenger to open the door, he grabbed his gun and began shooting instead. The gang fired back but no one was hurt. The spunky guard finally opened the door. Sam got away with $3,000 this time, his second biggest haul of a short career. But Spotswood had lost his mask during the fracas and was recognized. He was soon arrested, tried and convicted. A second trial due to "new evidence" was held and Spotswood acquitted. Losing just one man didn't slow down Sam, and soon he was ready to hit another train. This time he went just below Dallas to Hutchins to attack the Houston and Texas Central again. Shooting erupted as the express agent tried to prevent the holdup, but he was wounded and soon gave in. The three bandits rode off with very little cash. The alert messenger had hidden most of the money in the cold stove before he let anyone into the express car. On March 31, 1878, Henry Underwood joined the gang after escaping from a Nebraska jail, and brought along Arkansas Jackson, who had been a cell mate. It was during the spring of 1878 that Sam Bass became a legend around Dallas. A song written about him then persists to this day in folk music. Part of it went this way: "Sam Bass was born in Indiana, it was his native home, And at the age of seventeen, young Sam began to roam Sam first came out to Texas, a cowboy for to be-A kinderhearted fellow you seldom ever see." Within fifty days he robbed four trains and had Dallas "set on its ear" for his daring. All of these robberies took place within 25 miles of Dallas and aroused so much panic that bankers and businessmen kept loaded guns within reach at all times. The honest folks of Dallas predicted that new settlers would not come to Texas, and that people would refuse to ride the trains unless something was done about Sam Bass. Detectives, newspapermen and dime novelists flocked to Dallas to get in on the biggest story of the year. For three months a real "cops and robbers" aura of the best Old West tradition hung over the little community of Dallas. Sam hit another train, this one on the Texas and Pacific Line at Eagle Ford on April 4. He used Arkansas Johnson and two neophytes. It was routine. There was no shooting but Sam had to break down the express car door. The four men found only $50 to split among them. Dallas was in an uproar. Although Sam had not been identified positively, most of the people decided he was the leader of the robberies. Pressure mounted. The lawmen sweated and waited, wondering where Sam would strike next. Visiting newspapermen soon discovered that Dallas was not as civilized as Boston or Philadelphia. Fewer than five thousand residents made up the town. Two strong elements played tug of war over the village. The town mayor

tried to create law and order, to pass city ordinances, but the saloon owners and gambling hall operators and madams simply refused to recognize any city laws. They owned the north side of Main from Houston to Austin avenues, and were not about to be ruled by a mayor or town marshal. Sometimes the "respectable" people in Dallas hired arsonists to burn down the elegant and lavish houses of prostitution. But they were rebuilt, bigger, gaudier and more expensive than before. But what really set Dallas apart from the sophisticated towns of the East in 1878 were the cattle. When a trail drive of 2500 Texas longhorns headed for market, they came to Dallas to ford the Trinity. And that meant they came right down unpaved Main Street, eliminating any buggy or horse traffic, coating the town with a fantastic layer of dust from the ten thousand hooves, and always depositing enough manure to keep the ladies from dragging their long skirts in the streets for months. It was a Texas that Sam Bass knew and functioned in. Some say he knew there was mounting pressure on the Texas Rangers to find him and put him in prison, but he kept right on robbing trains. He got more men--Underwood, Jackson, Johnson, Sam Pipes and Al Herndon. They all met at the home of Bill Collins to make plans. (This Collins was not related to the Joel Collins who masterminded the Big Springs robbery.) On April 18, 1878 all except Collins took over the Mesquite station just east of Dallas and halted the train. Instead of surrendering, the conductor, one Jules Alvord, grabbed a six-gun and started shooting. In the volley of gunfire, Alvord was wounded in the arm and gave up. The men in the express car heard the shooting and were ready. The messenger was armed and backed up by a guard with a double-barreled shotgun. They refused to open the door and shot through it instead. Sam was ready for this problem. He splashed kerosene under the door and gave the two men to a count of 50 to open the door or they would be burned to cinders. When Sam reached a count of 40, the door came open. This time the safe yielded only $150. As often happened with Sam's band of loosely assembled outlaws, two of the men split off after this robbery, and were soon captured and tried. Sam went into hiding in Cove Hollow in Grayson county--north of Dallas bordering the Indian Territory. Eleven days after the Mesquite robbery, lawmen found out that Sam was holed up in Jim Murphy's house. A squad of Texas Rangers moved up to attack. Here Sam Bass showed his strategic ability. He advanced on the rangers to the edge of a steep canyon, breaking the attacking force of lawmen into two units and lessening their effectiveness. In the running gun battle, Sam came close to death. One bullet severed his cartridge belt, and another smashed the rifle from his hands. Sam decided it was time to move. The gang pulled out, going through the canyon. Sam was in familiar country and outlasted the posse even though the Rangers kept on his trail. They were definitely on the run now, going first to Underwood's place, but leaving when the lawmen approached. Clear Creek was their next stop, then on to Hard Carter's ranch near Denton. The next morning they found themselves surrounded again. A blazing gun battle broke out, but the gang faded away without suffering any wounds.

Word spread that Sam was surrounded and scores of armed citizens rode out to help hunt him down. Members of the gang avoided contact and made their way to Hickory Creek and slipped away again. Sam Bass's short life span was slipping away too, but he didn't realize it yet. He seemed destined for a total life of crime in the old fashioned way. It seems he never really tried to fit into the changing society. Everyone in Texas was talking about the yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans where 4,500 had died. Edison had adapted electricity for household use by learning to subdivide the current. In Dallas they heard about the university students battling police and mounted Cossacks in St. Petersburg. Gilbert and Sullivan presented the first performance of H.M.S. Pinafore. But Sam Bass knew about none of this. He was running for his life. Late in May the gang was surrounded in Big Caddo Creek in Stephens County but again got away. Two weeks later a posse caught the gang camped near a stream. Johnson was shot dead and the rest of the outlaws escaped but only after losing their horses and equipment. In this fight, Underwood got separated from the band, and was never heard from again by Sam or the law. The importance of law and order in Texas led to the downfall of Sam Bass. On May 1, Jim Murphy and his father had been arrested for harboring a criminal at their Cove Hollow farm. Jim Murphy didn't like jail and made a deal with the Texas Rangers to help them catch Bass, if the charges against him and his father were dropped. The plan was for Jim to jump bail and get in touch with Bass. Jim did and stayed at his ranch until Sam showed up almost a month later on June 15. Murphy pretended to join the outlaw band, telling how he had been arrested and got away. Seaborn Barnes arrived and they began looking for a bank to rob. Henry Collins joined them and told Sam that he'd heard that Murphy had made a deal with the law. Confronted with the evidence Murphy said sure he made a deal, but just so he could get out of jail. He wasn't going to turn against his old friends. They argued over Murphy. Sam decided Murphy was a traitor, and decided to kill him. At the last moment, Jackson intervened, believing Murphy was loyal. Sam's generosity cost him his life. They kept looking for a good bank. Murphy suggested the Williamson County Bank at Round Rock would be a good target. During the ride there they stopped at Belton and Georgetown, which gave Murphy a chance to send letters to the Rangers telling about the robbery at Round Rock. On July 14 they camped outside of town and Sam began laying out plans. They would hit the bank at 3:30 the next afternoon, after putting their horses in the alley. Bass and Barnes would enter the bank with Jackson and Murphy guarding the door. This time the Rangers were ready. Murphy's doublecrossing letters had done their work. Two detachments of Texas Rangers were in town, as well as a Ranger captain, a county deputy sheriff and the local sheriff. The bank was alerted and men were posted there and in the railroad depot.

But the robbery never took place. Friday night Bass and his three men went into town to get some tobacco. Murphy feared what might happen and so left the trio, saying he would go get corn for the horses. Bass, Barnes and Jackson went toward the general store. Deputy Sheriff Moore spotted them, recognized Bass and warned the county deputy. The two lawmen crossed the street and went into the store behind the outlaws. Deputy Sheriff Grimes walked up to the men, leaving Moore at the door. He asked one if he was wearing a gun. All three said yes, drew and fired before the lawman could draw. Grimes fell with six bullets in him and Sheriff Moore took a slug through his lung. He kept firing but said after his first shot he couldn't see what he was firing at. As the outlaws ran out the front door, Moore saw two of them bleeding. When the Rangers heard the shooting, they ran to the scene, firing at the robbers as they moved toward their horses. The whole village went into an uproar, with men who could find weapons joining in the fight. Bass and his two robbers took cover behind fences and houses, firing as they retreated to their horses. Early in the exchange Sam Bass took a slug through his hand. Before he got to his horse a Ranger shot him in the back. Jackson helped Bass onto his horse and held him there. Just as Barnes was mounting he fell dead from a bullet in the head. Jackson and Bass rode off. Five Rangers rode in pursuit, but lost the trail in the dark. Four miles out of town, Sam's wound hurt him so badly he had to stop. Bass gave Jackson all of his money, his gun and ammunition and his horse, insisting that Jackson take it and ride on looking out for himself. At last Jackson left. He stopped at a farm house for some drinking water, and the woman noticed that he was bloody. When he left she watched his direction and the next day told the Rangers, who found and arrested him. The morning after the shoot-out, the Texas Rangers found Bass lying under a tree four miles from town. He was taken to town and treated but his wound was massive and he lost strength. Sam was questioned but refused to give any details of the gang. He said that ff one of his bullets had killed Sheriff Grimes, it was the first man he had ever killed. Sam Bass died on his birthday, July 21, 1878. He had reached the mellow old age of twenty-seven years. BELLE STARR : THE BANDIT QUEEN by Gary Brandner In the winter of 1889 a shotgun blast put an end to the life of the Old West's most famous female bandit--Belle Starr. She never killed anybody and, as far as is known, never even took a shot at anybody. The only prison term she served was for stealing a horse. Yet the name Belle Starr remains linked with some of the most vicious killers and desperadoes of the day--men like Frank and Jesse James and the Younger brothers. Forty-one years before the buckshot ripped into Belle Starr she was born

Myra Belle Shirley on a farm near Carthage, Missouri. The date was February 5, 1848. That was a time of growing hostility between Missourians and the neighboring territory of Kansas, soon to be a state. The battle lines were drawn between abolitionists coming in from the East and pro-slavery forces in Missouri. As history tells us, the abolitionists eventually won, but a bloody inter-state feud was born that outlasted the Civil War and deeply affected the lives of Belle Starr and her friends. At the time Belle was born Jasper County, Missouri, was mostly wilderness, the farms in small clearings many miles apart. The typical farm home consisted of two clapboard one-room houses joined by a common roof. This left a third room between the houses, open on two sides, which could be used in good weather as a dining room or extra bedroom. Because the Osage Indians in the surrounding country occasionally attacked one of the tiny settlements, the sheds and barns were built adjoining the house to form a rude stockade. The cleared area was surrounded by a zig-zag rail fence. By 1856 Belle's father, John Shirley, had sold his farm and moved into Carthage to become an innkeeper. Carthage was a good spot for an inn, since it lay on the way to Fort Smith, the jumping-off point for a newly opened route to the West. A roadside inn in those days was usually a barnlike brick or frame building two stories high. On the ground floor was the lobby, living room, dining room, bar, and game room. There was usually a big open fireplace, and pallets were available for the traveler who preferred not to sleep upstairs where there was no heat, and where he would probably have to share a bed with two or three other people. There was no running water, no bath, no toilet, and hardly any privacy. Ten or fifteen people, all strangers, might be sleeping in the same room. Still, it was better than sleeping in the woods. In 1857 William Clark Quantrill moved into the Kansas-Missouri dispute with his infamous band of raiders. He operated nominally on the Confederate side, but the Union-sympathizing Kansas Jayhawkers were just as bad. Both guerrilla groups used the Civil War as an excuse for random looting, pillaging, and murder. Among the top lieutenants in Quantrill's band was the man who would become Belle's first lover--Thomas Coleman Younger, known then and now as Cole. One of the young men who joined the Missouri bushwhackers was Belle's older brother, Bud Shirley. In June of 1863, at the age of twenty-three, Bud was killed by Federal militia. The year his son died John Shirley decided he'd had enough of the border bloodshed. He sold the inn, packed his wife and daughter into an ox-team wagon, and headed for Texas. It was a tortuous, roundabout journey. John Shirley had to avoid the dangerous parts of the Indian Territory, now the state of Oklahoma. The tribes that had settled there--Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles, and Creeks--were having their own internal strife, which was just as bitter as the War Between the States. The Shirleys' destination was the village of Scyene, just east of Dallas. There Belle's oldest brother, Preston, had a farm. When the family arrived in 1864 Dallas had but one street, which was a dust bowl in the summer and a mud hole in the winter. The buildings along Main Street, as it was inevitably called, were single-story saloons, stores, restaurants, gambling halls, and banks, many with false two-story fronts. Plank sidewalks were scarce, but some of the businesses built wooden porches out in front with benches for sitting and post-rails for tying horses. At the end of the Civil War the Northern guerrillas were granted amnesty

for all acts committed during the war, while their Southern counterparts were held accountable, hunted down and hanged or imprisoned. To former Confederate guerrillas this decision seemed highly unfair. It helped turn many of them into outlaws. When Quantrill's raiders split up Cole Younger took one group with him down to Texas. There, he knew, lived many former Missourians, who would be sympathetic to the ex-bushwhackers. In July of 1866 a small group of horsemen rode up to John Shirley's farmhouse at Scyene. They followed the custom of hallooing from a distance rather than walking straight up to the door. That was considered an intrusion on the householder's privacy, and could also get a man shot. John Shirley recognized the leader--a tall, well-built man with wavy brown hair--as Cole Younger. The other riders were Cole's brothers, Jim, Bob, and John, and another Missourian from up Clay County way, Jesse James. John Shirley welcomed the former Quantrill men into his home. While they stayed there a love affair developed between Myra Belle Shirley and Cole Younger. The outcome of this was a daughter born to Belle. The child was called Pearl Younger, though there was never a marriage between Belle and Cole Younger. In those days the birth of an illegitimate child was considered a disgrace, even in Texas, and the neighbors began to shun the Shirley family. Cole Younger, meanwhile, pulled out of Scyene along with his gang. A few months earlier the Younger-James gang had invented a new type of crime in Liberty, Missouri--bank robbery. They rode into town shooting and yelling to scare everybody off the streets, then walked in and cleaned out the Clay County Savings Association Bank without resistance. The only casualty was a nineteen-year-old boy who did not get out of the way fast enough and was shot dead by one of the gang. Cole and Jesse were readily identified as the gang leaders since this was their home territory. In May, 1867, the gang tried it again at the Hughes and Mason Bank in Richmond, Missouri. This time it was not so easy. The townspeople heard the outlaws coming and turned out to defend their town. Seven citizens of Richmond, including the mayor, were killed. As the offered rewards grew for the Younger brothers and Jesse James, they decided it would be wise to lay low for a while. For this purpose Cole Younger bought a farm near the Shirleys in Scyene, which was to be a hangout for the gang. Cole invited Belle to join him, but by then the lady had other ideas. Rather than stay at the Shirleys' farm, Belle left pearl with her parents and went to Dallas. There she worked as an entertainer in a dance hall, and later dealt faro and poker in the gambling halls. She was making good money and had become a familiar figure in Dallas, recognized for her spectacular dress and horsemanship. Belle's usual costume was a man's Stetson hat with the brim turned up, decorated with an ostrich plume, a high-collared bodice jacket, and flowing skirts. As did all women in the early West, Belle rode sidesaddle. Her saddle was custom-made at a cost of one hundred dollars. When Cole Younger offered to let her join him at his farm and, incidentally, do the cooking and housework for the gang, Belle told him, in effect, to buzz off. Although there is no record of the two ever resuming their love affair, Belle retained an affection for Cole the rest of her life. She named the farm where she spent her last years "Younger's Bend."

In 1872 John Shirley's Scyene farm was visited by a gang of some twenty outlaws, including still another former Missourian, Jim Reed. Belle, who was living back at home at the time, entertained most of the gang before settling on Reed as her favorite. After several days John Shirley lost patience and ordered the desperadoes off his place, locking Belle in an upstairs bedroom. However, as the gang pulled out, resourceful Jim Reed ran a ladder up to the window and abducted Belle. They went through a "marriage" ceremony of sorts, with another of the outlaws, John Fischer, officiating. The couple traveled to Rich Hill, Missouri, where Jim Reed left Belle on a farm while he took off on a matter of personal vengeance. It seems Jim's brother, Scott Reed, had been gunned down by some Shannon boys under the impression they were shooting John Fischer. Jim Reed caught up with the Shannons and put the blast on two of them. About the same time, Reed allied himself with the Starrs, a rambunctious family of Cherokee Indians who were engaged in a bitter feud within the Cherokee Nation. The head of the Starr clan was Old Tom, six-feet-five and straight as a pike pole. There were at least eight sons, one of whom was Sam Starr, who was to give Belle the name she made famous. After he killed the two Shannons, things got hot for Jim Reed in Missouri, and he packed Belle and Pearl off to California. Belle's second and last child, Ed Reed, was born in Los Angeles. Although there is no record of Jim's activities in California, it is safe to assume that he made a living in his usual manner--robbery. When he returned from California Jim Reed bought a farm near that of his father-in-law, John Shirley, at Scyene. The old man now grudgingly accepted Belle's "marriage" to Reed, since the birth of his grandson. The first robbery in which Belle is said to have personally taken part occurred on the evening of November 20, 1873. The victim was an aged and wealthy Creek Indian named Watt Grayson who lived on the North Canadian River, not far from the home of Tom Starr and his brood. Accounts of the crime say that four robbers forced their way into the Grayson house. One of them was a woman dressed in man's clothing, later identified as Belle. When Grayson refused to tell where his money was hidden, the bandits looped a noose around his neck and threw the other end of the rope over a rafter. They repeatedly hoisted Grayson aloft as his terrified wife looked on, choking the breath from the old Indian until he showed them where to find a hidden trap door. The loot consisted of $22,000 in gold and another $12,000 in worthless Confederate greenbacks. Following the Grayson robbery Jim Reed and Belle moved to Dallas. There Belle took up residence at the Planters' Hotel while Jim, with a price on his head, kept out of sight. Belle took the opportunity to live it up. The law gave her no trouble, even though she was known to be an intimate of outlaws. People began calling her the Bandit Queen. The nickname appealed to Belle, and she began to live the part. She decked herself out in flowing black velvet with a brace of revolvers holstered at her waist, and barged around Dallas drinking, card playing, and hell-raising as the equal of any man. Sometimes she would get into a fringed buckskin outfit and gallop through the streets shooting at the sky and scattering pedestrians. On April 7, 1874 the San Antonio-Austin stage was robbed. Stagecoach robbery was not uncommon in other parts of the West, but it was something new in Texas, so the crime was big news locally. Jim Reed was identified as one of the bandits and hunted for the next few months. In August Deputy

Sheriff John T. Morris caught up with him in a farmhouse fifteen miles northwest of McKinney, Texas. When Morris called for Reed to surrender, the outlaw dived under a wooden table, upended it, and rushed the deputy using the table as a shield. Since the tabletop was not bulletproof, it was no great trick for Morris to put three bullets through the wood, killing Reed with the third shot. There is a grisly epilog to the death of Jim Reed that occurred after his body was returned to McKinney. The following is from a dispatch with a date of August 8, 1874, that appeared in the major Texas newspapers: Reed's body had become very much decomposed, particularly about the head, having been shot just between the nose and the right eye. The drayman, in carrying him to the potter's field mistook the place, and in returning, with the breeze to the windward of the corpse, he took sick, and was compelled to abandon it on the roadside. It was, however, taken charge of by the sheriff, and finally interred. The year 1874 was a bad one for outlaw friends of Belle. Not only did Jim Reed cash in, but John, the youngest of the Younger brothers, was killed near Monegaw Springs, Missouri, in a shoot-out with Pinkerton detectives, and John Fischer, who had performed Belle's "marriage" ceremony, was gunned down by peace officers in Waco, Texas. After Reed's death Belle deposited young Ed and Pearl with relatives. With no children to tie her down, Belle returned to Dallas and began helling around again. During this time she was arrested once for arson and once for horse stealing. She beat the rap on both counts. In 1876 the lawless career of the three surviving Younger brothers came to an end. Cole, Jim, and Bob Younger, along with Frank and Jesse James and three others, staged a disastrous raid on the bank at Northfield, Minnesota. One citizen and two bandits were killed. Cole Younger was badly wounded, and all three brothers were captured near Madelia, Minnesota. Only the James boys escaped. The take from the attempted robbery? Nothing. The Youngers pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty, and were sentenced to life in the Minnesota state penitentiary at Stillwater. Bob died in prison in 1889 of tuberculosis. Cole and Jim were paroled in 1901. A year later Jim committed suicide. Cole Younger died March 21, 1916, after a year's illness, at the age of seventy-two. He was the only one of Belle Starr's lovers to die with his boots off. With Cole Younger in prison and Jim Reed dead, Belle severed any ties she might still have had with honest society. She allied herself openly with a band of desperadoes ranging throughout Texas and the Indian Territory. She chose lovers by whim and discarded them quickly. Among this semi-select group were such outlaws as Jack Spaniard, Jim French, Sam Starr, John Middieton, Jim July, and a swarthy character known as Blue Duck, with whom Belle posed for one of her rare photographs. By the time she was thirty Belle was the acknowledged leader among her circle of outlaws. She kept them in line with her powerful will, her superior intelligence, and plain old sex appeal. Though she was no beauty, possessing a lantern jaw and smallish, deep-set eyes, there was something about Belle that turned men on. Some time in 1880 Belle officially became Belle Starr. She married Sam Starr, son of the tough old Cherokee, Tom Starr. Sam was twenty-eight years old to Belle's thirty-two. After the death of Jim Reed, the lovers Belle

took were progressively younger than she was. Sam and Belle Starr moved into their home in the Indian Territory-a two-room log house on the banks of the Canadian River that became known as Younger's Bend. The only approach to the house was along a narrow, wooded canyon trail. In later years Belle built two more cabins on the grounds for the outlaws who made Younger's Bend a regular stopover. One of these visitors was Jesse James. After lying low for a few years after the Northfield raid, Jesse ran out of money and gathered some of his old gang together. Brother Frank, who was in poor health, did not join him this time. The new James gang pulled three train robberies, the last on September 7, 1881, then disbanded. Jesse headed for Younger's Bend to hole up for a while. Belle never cared much for Jesse James. For one thing, he was walking around free while Cole Younger was in prison. Also, Cole and Jesse had never really gotten along, being rivals for leadership of the gang, and Belle naturally took Cole's side. However, Jesse was ready and able to pay for sanctuary at Younger's Bend, and Belle Starr was not a woman to turn down a dollar. In April of 1882, after Jesse had left Younger's Bend for St. Joseph, Missouri, he was shot in the back by Bob Ford. For a couple of years Belle stayed out of public sight, apparently content with being the brains of her outlaw gang. Then in February, 1883, she was arrested and convicted of a crime for the only time in her life. Belle and Sam Starr were brought into Fort Smith, charged with stealing horses. It took a jury just one hour to find them guilty. The Starrs were sentenced to a year each in the Federal penitentiary at Detroit. They actually served nine months, with time off for good behavior. After their release, Sam and Belle returned to Younger's Bend, and Belle resumed direction of her band of desperadoes. Among the new arrivals was a man named John Middleton, who was wanted in Arkansas and Texas for arson, larceny, and murder. The time was around Christmas of 1884. About the same time Sam Starr was implicated in a robbery of the Creek Nation treasury, and both U.S. marshals and Indian police were after him. Sam left Younger's Bend for several months to hide out with kin, leaving Belle alone with John Middleton. Belle's ardor for Sam Starr had apparently cooled, and she and Middleton made plans to slip away together. They were to travel separately, Middleton being a wanted man, and meet at the mountain home of Middleton's mother near Dardanelle, Arkansas. They set off on May 5, 1885, Belle in a covered wagon loaded with provisions, and Middleton on horseback. Belle reached the rendezvous in Dardanelle, but John Middleton never did. Three days after the couple had separated, a horse was found entangled in the brush on the bank of the Poteau River a few miles from the Arkansas border. A search of the fiver turned up the badly decomposed body of a man, apparently drowned, that had washed up on the bank. Half the face was gone--eaten away by buzzards was the supposition. After she verified that the body was, indeed, John Middleton, Belle returned to Younger's Bend and Sam Starr. How she explained the situation to Sam is not known. Some people suspected that it was not buzzards who destroyed the face of John Middleton, but the impassive Indian, Sam Starr, who had trailed his wife's lover and shot him out of the saddle with a shotgun.

Things kept getting hotter for Sam Starr, with both the Federal government and the Indian authorities after him. In September, 1886, Chief Bill Vann of the Cherokee Nation caught sight of Sam as he rode through a cornfield on a favorite black mare of Belle's named Venus. Vann, who had three other Indian policemen with him, called to Sam to Surrender. When Sam spurred his horse to a gallop Vann fired several times, killing the horse and wounding Sam in the arm. Sam was lodged overnight in a farmhouse where his wound was dressed. The plan was to take him the next day to face the Choctaw Council. However, word of Sam's capture reached a gang of his brothers and friends and they surrounded the farmhouse, overpowered the guards, and rescued Sam. When Belle heard that Bill Vann was organizing a large posse of Cherokees to retake her husband, she persuaded Sam that he would be better off taking his chances with the Federal court in Fort Smith. There he could be released on bond. This would put him under the protection of the U.S. government, safe from Indian authorities. If he faced the tribal courts his chances were not good, since the Choctaw chiefs hated the whole family of Starrs, holding them responsible for much of the outlawry in the Indian Territory. Sam took Belle's advice and rode into Fort Smith where he was arraigned and almost immediately released on bail. It was a case of mistaken identity that finally finished Sam Starr. Somehow, Sam got the idea that the shots in the cornfield that wounded him and killed Belle's horse were fired by Frank West, a neighbor he had been feuding with for some time. In Christmas week of 1886 Sam, Belle, and the now-grown children, Pearl and Ed, rode down to a dance on the south side of the Canadian River near Whitefield. It was dark by the time they arrived. Many of the celebrants were gathered around a fire outside the cabin where the dancing was going on. Among those seated before the fire, Sam recognized Frank West. Sam cussed West out for the supposed cornfield shooting, then pulled out his six-shooter and blazed away. One of his slugs tore a hole in West's throat, but before West went down he drew his own gun and got off a shot that caught Sam Starr in the side and drove upward into the heart. Sam staggered over to a tree and held himself up there for several seconds before toppling forward on his face. By the time bystanders reached the fallen men, both were dead. Not long after Sam's death Belle, at thirty-eight, married a handsome twenty-four-year-old Creek Indian named Jim July. At Belle's insistence he changed his name to conform with hers, and was thereafter known as Jim Starr. On February 2, 1889, Jim Starr rode into Fort Smith to answer a charge of larceny. Belle rode along with her husband for about fifteen miles, then turned back. The next afternoon Belle's daughter Pearl was startled to see her mother's horse gallop into Younger's Bend riderless. A little later a neighbor found the body of Belle Starr lying face down in the muddy road, dead of buckshot wounds in the back. Jim Starr was given a continuance on his trial so he could attend his wife's burial service. There he made a citizen's arrest of a farmer named Edgar Watson declaring that he was Belle's murderer. Jim ascribed to Watson the rather flimsy motive of having argued with Belle earlier about the rental of some lands. Watson was held in jail at Fort Smith for nearly three months, then released for lack of evidence.

Several theories went the rounds concerning who really killed Belle Starr. One theory held that Belle's son, Ed Reed, had engaged in an incestuous relationship with his mother, and had killed her because he was jealous of Jim Starr. Another said that Jim Starr himself, learning of some new infidelity of Belle's, had sneaked back behind her on the trail and shot her. Still another guess is that John Middleton's brother Jim blasted Belle out of the saddle to avenge the death of his brother, for which he blamed Belle. The real killer, whoever he was, was never caught. Jim Starr did not return to Fort Smith on the new date set for his trial, and in January, 1890, he was shot by deputy marshals while trying to avoid arrest. The wounded man was brought into Fort Smith, and four days later he died--the last lover of the Bandit Queen. BILLY THE KID : WESTERN ROBIN HOOD by Allan Morgan In the late 1860's the cattle frontier was advancing westward as well as toward the north, from Texas. Lincoln County, in south-central New Mexico, was one of the finest ranges for cattle, having excellent grass and a good climate. It also provided a ready market at the nearby military posts and reservations. Lincoln County, Billy the Kid's stamping ground, nearly 300,000 square acres, typified the Old West of the movies. In the town of Lincoln, then the county seat, were found the saloons and characters of which these horse operas were made. Old-time Lincoln was a cow town--not a railroad or a mining town. To it flocked the gunslingers, gamblers, the badmen one jump ahead of the law, the soldiers and rustlers and the girls. All the "western" movie cliches did occur here... the rustling, the fights over water holes, feuds over grazing rights, squabbles over government contracts and so on. And that strutting gunman, that cock of the walk: Billy the Kid. In Lincoln County one of the most famous cattle feuds of the West took place... centering around Billy. In 1878 the so-called Lincoln County War flared up between the rival Murphy and Tunstall-McSween factions. The war lasted five months and culminated in a three-day gunfight on the streets of Lincoln in which a half dozen men were killed and more wounded. The early West varied. The cattlemen and cowboys of the south were a very different breed from those of Montana, for instance. The stagecoach lines wrote their own story; stagelines went everywhere, connecting tiny hamlets with larger towns, with the railroads, with civilization. Badmen robbed the stages; the Rangers and sheriffs chased the badmen. The railroads wrote another chapter of the West, a very different one from all others. Most do not realize the railroad spanned the continent only four years after the Civil War. (The peak years of bloody Abilene and Dodge City had not yet begun.) Miners tramped the hills and deserts long before barbed wire--and they still do. Mining communities sprang up, such as the notorious Cripple Creek. They were every bit as wild and woolly as the cow towns. The soldiers and Indians were another facet of the West. The Indian wars lasted until the 1890's. Soldiers were the only law in many vast territories. Homesteaders and farmers wrote another page; sheepmen wrote their chapter and fought with the cattlemen over ranges and water. The early West was constant change. The cattle drives soon gave way to the railroads. The huge open ranges gave way to barbed wire. Lawlessness and violence gave way to vigilance committees and real law.

Shacks and tents gave way to real houses. Lincoln was a town of adobe houses, frame buildings and the famous false fronts which have come to be the trademark of the western town. Early photographs show streets with store buildings fronted by porticos held up by wooden posts, shading boardwalks. New Mexico's sun is hot. We see rough corrals, privies and stark telegraph poles. There was no electricity and no gas. Adobe was a popular construction material. It was solid, vermin free and cool in summer, warm in winter. Air conditioning had not yet been thought of. Heating was by stove or fireplace. Women cooked on wood stoves. Someone had to haul water to each house for cooking, washing and drinking. People bathed infrequently. But they wanted to better themselves. Traveling salesmen went everywhere for orders. Mail order houses grew fat because of the demand for their products. Catalogs were cherished and pored over. The movies seldom show this desire for schools and betterment. They focus on the violence and stark drama of the age--like the Lincoln County War. The most violent figure of that conflict was William H. Bonney, known as Billy the Kid. Billy was an outlaw. If he ever worked for a living it was infrequently, and never for any length of time. He detested work. Of course working for wages in that day was a terrible way to try for riches. A cowhand in the saddle from dawn to dusk, and sometimes half the night, hot weather and freezing, made about forty dollars a month. When he worked, that is. Many cowboys worked as firemen on railroads in slack seasons. As an outlaw, Billy could do ten times as well in a few days by selling the cows that got tangled in his rope. Or he spent his time gambling, as most gunmen did. Of all the outlaws of the Old West, Billy the Kid is one of the most legendary. He is also one about whom the facts are extremely elusive. Early writers were careless of facts and sometimes attributed the deeds of one person to another. No badmen kept diaries. Memories faded and became rose-colored with the passing of years. It is sure that Billy was loved by some, tolerated by many and feared by others. He was apparently a complex character. Men who knew him described him as a fine fellow, jolly and fun-loving--while he was engaged in having a good time. But he could turn, in the flick of an eye, from good-natured to homicidal. One of the things that sets him apart from other, lesser known men who were just as dangerous and good with a gun, was his personality. It is apparent, from all that was said and written about him by people who knew him well, that he had an attractive personality... when he wanted to turn it on. Almost nothing is known of his early life, including the place of his birth which is variously given as New Mexico Territory and Brooklyn, New York. When he was about ten he lived in Silver City, Colorado with his mother and stepfather, William Antrim, whom he hated. (Some say Billy's real name was McCarty.) Mostly he went under the name Bonney. Silver City was an ordinary frontier town, filled with the usual hard cases and undesirable elements. There were many of these types in the West for several excellent reasons: they were dodging eastern police; they could not compete elsewhere and drifted with the winds; and on the frontier, law was absent or lax. Billy hung out in the stores and saloons, listening and learning from the

toughs and desperados. His mother was apparently his only restraining influence. But when his mother died he began running wild. He left home and was soon in serious trouble. He shot a man in an argument and skipped town in a hurry. He was about twelve years old at the time. For a while he drifted, and no one knows exactly where. (Billy did not always tell the truth.) He gambled, and he laid in supplies, signing the chits with his six gun. Probably he rustled horses and cattle and sold them where he could. It should be said that often small time rustlers were treated kindly by juries. Juries were made up of ordinary men who believed that the big cattle outfits had got their start swinging a "wide loop" branding any cow they could find--and they weren't about to condemn a man who did the same thing. (Stealing a horse was another matter. That was often worse than murder.) But Billy survived, and he did not work. His closest friends said that Billy was not the type to hold down a regular job. In Lincoln County he met, and some say worked for, John Tunstall. Billy liked Tunstall, saying he was the only man who had ever treated him fair. Tunstall was a young Englishman who, with Alexander McSween, owned a banking and mercantile company in Lincoln. McSween and Tunstall were friends of John Chisum, the cattle baron, but they were competitors of L. G. Murphy of the Murphy, Riley, Dolan Company. Murphy, Riley & Dolan had a big store, housing offices, a billiard room, a post office, visitors rooms and living quarters. They did not want competition and they set about driving it out of town. This business opposition led to hard feelings, then to a blood feud. It resulted in the killing of Tunstall... the event that started the Lincoln County War. Tunstall was murdered in cold blood by members of Sheriff William Brady's posse. Brady was a Murphy man. Furious, Billy took out after the unprosecuted killers of his friend. At this time Billy Bonney (alias McCarty, alias Antrim, alias Kid) was a small man--thus the name Kid--about five feet, seven inches in height, but lean and hard as a cougar. He had straight brown hair and light blue eyes flecked with brown, and a long chin. Men who knew him said he was usually smiling. His most obvious physical characteristic was his two buck teeth. He is credited with a "careless gaiety," even by Pat Garrett who knew him well. He could be the life of the party. Many poor families, both Anglo and Mexican, considered him a Robin Hood. He gave them presents--perhaps beef--and was often in their homes. They knew what he was. These were the people who did not give him up to the law, even when they knew about the large reward to be had for a right word. Billy went to the bailes--dances--and romanced the girls. He was a hero to the poor. Unfortunately he was also a killer without conscience. He took few chances at killing, however. He usually waited till he had the odds in his favor, and he was not above outright murder. Because of the Tunstall murder, Sheriff Brady and a deputy were shot down in the main street of Lincoln in broad daylight. Witnesses did not come forward readily. But Billy the Kid was one of the accused. Sheriff Brady was the good/bad lawman of the horse operas. It was not unusual for a horse thief to later become a marshal or a sheriff. The notorious Billy Brooks, gunslinger and horse thief, became a lawman--and was later lynched by an angry mob in Kansas. Brady was a member of the

Murphy faction and did not bother to arrest the murderers of John Tunstall. At Brady's death the McSween group "elected" their own sheriff, but the election did not stick. The Murphy aggregation appealed to the pro-Murphy governor of the territory. The governor appointed a sheriff, a man named Peppin--another Murphy man. One of the men who had killed Tunstall was Andrew Roberts, called Buckshot by his pals. Roberts was a small but tough ex-soldier who carried buckshot pellets in one shoulder from an early encounter. He could not lift a rifle above the waist. Billy and half a dozen others went after him and cornered him finally near a mill. Buckshot put up a terrific fight. He killed several and wounded others and rnade the affair so hot for Billy that he and his pals hastily departed. They had enough of Buckshot Roberts. This particular battle has been described as one of the most unequal and desperate of the West. The new sheriff, Peppin, thereupon set out to bring in Billy, dead or alive, and to flatten the Tunstall-McSween group once and for all. The sheriff and his posse, which included a few out-of-town hired guns, succeeded in running Billy and his friends to earth in Lincoln. They were in the McSween residence. The house was besieged. The sheriffs men surrounded it and fired into the adobe house with long range buffalo rifles. The people inside fired back through loopholes and windows. Both McSween and his wife were in the house. This was the final showdown of the Tunstall-McSween and Murphy groups. The desperate fight lasted three days. Men from both sides were killed, including McSween himself. The Murphy supporters managed to get close enough to set fire to the house. The roof was ablaze, filling the house with smoke. When the roof fell in, the defenders were forced out. They ran from the smoke and fire into the darkness and many were shot down. Billy the Kid, a pistol in each hand, ran out spewing bullets and succeeded in getting away. It was the end of the feud. McSween and Tunstall were both dead and the Murphy faction was firmly in power in Lincoln County--for a time. But it was fading fast. All efforts turned to hunting down Billy. By reason of his siding with the losing group he was a marked man, wanted on several murder charges. But Billy still had his legions of poor friends, and some in high places who hated the Murphy people. No one betrayed him, but Billy left Lincoln and supported himself by rustling. He gathered a cutthroat gang about him and stole horses and cattle, selling them to buyers in small towns all the way to the Texas panhandle. Bills of sale were not difficult to manufacture, and rebranding was only a matter of work. Many ranchers did not look too closely at small herds offered for sale at reduced prices. Rustling was easy because most ranges were unfenced. Barbed wire had been invented in 1874, but its acceptance was slow. The wire was expensive at first and small holders could not afford it. Smooth wire had been tried and found to be ineffective. Why should wire with little barbs be any better? But those who used it found it did the job and by 1880 it was coming into wide use. It could separate herds, fence off water holes and delineate range lands.

It also started dozens of small range wars--fence wars, which were similar to waterhole wars. (Cowmen were apt to consider all water holes as public property and those fenced off called for shooting affairs.) Cowboys carried wire cutters, or hammer and staples, depending on which side they found themselves. It is true that barbed wire helped to bring law and order to the West, but it made a fence rider of the free-ranging cowhand. Many opposed it, on several grounds. The fiercely independent cowboy hated to be "fenced in," but in this he was bucking the inevitable. Billy, however, did not live long enough to see the range entirely fenced. About this time President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed a new governor to the New Mexico Territory. He was General Lew Wallace, one of the army's "civilian" generals, a man who had been at Shiloh with Grant during the Civil War. When he went to Lincoln, Wallace was engaged in writing the romantic novel which was to make him famous--Ben Hur. Assuming office, Governor Wallace was faced with a law and order crisis. At the center of this was Billy the Kid. In an effort to bring peace to the area, Wallace arranged for an interview with the outlaw, Bonney. He believed in going to the heart of the problem. The two men met secretly, face to face, and had a talk. If Billy would stop his depredations and settle down, Wallace might pardon him. Billy could then start over with a clean slate. Nothing came of this preliminary talk. The Murphy faction still demanded Billy's death by hanging. Posses hunted him. Billy was forced to kill several men who were trying to gun him. If Billy had hopes for a pardon they were shattered when Governor Wallace authorized another reward for him. And about this time Billy received other bad news. A man he knew very well, Pat Garrett, had just been elected sheriff of the county. Garrett was not a Murphy man. He was fearless and honest, and a gunslinger of no mean ability. As part of his job, Garrett set out to capture the outlaw, Billy the Kid. The issue was no longer that Billy was the fair-haired knight of the McSweens. Now he was only a horse and cattle thief and an accused murderer. But it didn't make him easier to catch. Sheriff Pat Garrett was en energetic man and his posses began to hound the Kid... who would not leave the area. Garrett and his men came upon Billy and several others finally in a stone hut once used by sheep-herders, near Stinking Springs. Billy had announced that he did not intend being taken alive, and that any lawman would have to come a-shooting. The posse surrounded the hut and called for the fugitives to give themselves up. The response was not encouraging. One of Billy's crew, Charlie Bowdre, showed himself in the doorway and was shot. The others held out for a time, but were starved into surrendering. They tossed their guns out and were taken into custody.

It was the winter of 1881. Billy was imprisoned in Las Vegas, New Mexico, later in Santa Fe. His appeals to the governor fell on deaf ears. A new president, James Garfield, had been elected and Governor Wallace's appointment would end with Garfield's inauguration. Let the next governor worry about an ordinary outlaw. Billy was tried and convicted in a pro-Murphy community. The old feud hatreds still hung over him. He was sentenced to hang in Lincoln, and turned over to Sheriff Garrett for the interim. Garrett installed his prisoner in a cell on the second floor of an old adobe building, formerly a store, now remodeled to be a courthouse. Two men were assigned to watch him. One of these guards was Bob Ollinger, a man who cordially hated Billy. The other man was a good-natured sort named J. W. Bell. Unfortunately, jails in small cow towns were unsophisticated lock-ups at best. For the most part they were intended to detain people for short stays. So the annals of the Old West are filled with accounts of jailbreaks of various kinds. Wes Hardin, the grim Texican, once broke jail when his friends and cousins tied a lasso rope to the bars of his cell window and pulled the entire thing out in one chunk. The built-in problem of frontier jails was plumbing--not that it wasn't in other buildings. Either the guards had to empty the chamber pots for the inmates, a job they detested, or they had to take each inmate to an outside privy on call. It is supposed that Billy used this excuse to make his break when Bell was guarding him. Oilinger was with the other prisoners, across the street at mealtime. Somehow Billy fooled Bell and got his hands on a pistol. He shot Bell dead. No one knows exactly how, because the two were alone. Hearing the shot, Oilinger ran back across the street toward the makeshift courthouse. Billy called to him from the second floor. When Oilinger looked up, Billy the Kid gave him both barrels with a shotgun--Ollinger's own gun. Then he broke the gun and threw it down at the body. The Kid armed himself, but he was shackled with leg irons. At gunpoint he got someone to file them off. He stole a horse and rode away... as witnesses say, laughing and jeering. Pat Garrett was out of town at the time. Considerable pressure was put on him to track down Billy at once. But he did not jump to do it. By his own words Garrett was censured for his seeming unconcern and inactivity in the matter of Billy's recapture. But his strategy was to make the Kid feel secure, and not to drive him out of the county. He feared that too much activity would lose him the chance to bring Billy to justice. Garrett kept his ear to the ground, wanting to be sure before he moved. Garrett got word that the Kid was in the vicinity of old Fort Sumner, one of his favorite haunts. Billy had a girl there. With two deputies, Garrett left at once, riding mostly at night and taking unfrequented roads. He well knew Billy's dependence on the grapevine. But Garrett did not locate Billy; he decided to talk to an old friend, Pete Maxwell who lived nearby. Garrett and his men approached Maxwell's house in the dark. A man they later learned was the Kid walked past them and entered

a wing of the Maxwell house. They thought the man was one of Maxwell's many relatives. Leaving his deputies outside, Garrett circled the house then went inside, finding Maxwell in bed. He walked to the head of the bed and sat down on it near the pillow, and asked Maxwell if he knew where the Kid was. Maxwell replied that Billy had been there, but he did not know where he was now. At that moment a man came to the door of the room. It was very dark but Garrett could discern a knife in one of the man's hands, and a pistol in the other. The man's feet made no sound, so he was probably bootless. At first Garrett thought the man was a relative or an employee of Maxwell's. The man came into the room, asking Maxwell in a Iow voice about the two strangers outside. Garrett realized that this was Billy--he knew Billy's voice. Billy came so close that Garrett might have reached out and touched him, before Billy realized suddenly there was someone sitting on the bed beside Maxwell. Billy raised his pistol and retreated rapidly toward the door asking, "Quien es? Quien es?" (Who's that? Who's that?) Garrett drew his pistol and fired twice. Billy the Kid fell dead. Billy's habit was to shoot first and think about it later. He had declared his intention to shoot Garrett on sight. This one time he hesitated had been the first, and it was fatal. The inquest was held the next day, exonerating Sheriff Garrett, declaring the shooting justifiable homicide. Billy was buried in the old cemetery at Fort Sumner July 15, 1881. His age was said to be 21 years and 7 months. Pat Garrett, in his own account of the shooting, goes to some pains to say that "the entire body was buried that day," and that it is still there. This is because it was not unusual for unscrupulous types to carry from town to town exhibits purporting to be the bodies, heads or skeletons of notorious men. After the assassination of Lincoln, for instance, there were probably dozens of side show exhibits displaying "Booth's" body. Billy the Kid died as he had lived-in a blaze of gunfire. The popular story was that he had killed a man for each year of his life, and maybe he had. Men like the Kid were not ones to shun trouble and they killed in out-of-the-way places as well as on main streets. Billy was tricky as a teased sidewinder, and he did not boast of his murders. There was much violence in his known life, so there is no reason to believe the pattern changed during those months that are not accounted for. Some feel that, on the whole, the world was better off without him. BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE WILD BUNCH by Daniel T. Streib Hunching deeper into his collar, the cowboy turned his back against the wind-driven slow, his eyes sweeping the raw canyon to the south. After hours of waiting, he was thoroughly chilled and just as disgusted. Finally, muttering something, he dug a pencil and paper from his pocket and scratched out a hurried message. He anchored the note under a stone, then

mounted the horse at his side and with a reassuring touch of his six-guns swung the horse to the north. He did not look back. The note lay there under the lone cedar tree for another sixteen hours before lawyer Douglas Preston and two Union Pacific executives drove up in their rented buckboard. Spotting the paper at his feet, Preston picked it up and read: "Damn you, Preston, you have double crossed me. I waited all day but you didn't show up. Tell the Union Pacific to go to hell. And you can go with them!" Thus ended Butch Cassidy's brief attempt to go straight. The time was early spring, 1900. The place, Lost Soldier Pass, a wild area forty-five miles north of Rock Springs, Wyoming. Having lost their way in the meandering canyons during the storm, the three men in the buckboard were a day late for their appointment with the undisputed leader of the biggest, wildest bunch of outlaws in the West. Cassidy must have foreseen the end of the famed outlaw era. By this time several of his "Wild Bunch" were dead or imprisoned--Elza Lay had been wounded and was in Laramie penitentiary; Bob Meeks had lost a leg in a futile escape attempt; George Curry was dead; and the bounties on Butch's head totalled $50,000. The straight life had begun to look good. With this in mind Cassidy had contacted first Judge Orlando Powers (some say Butch even had two private meetings with Utah Governor Wefts) and then Preston. The lawyer went to Union Pacific authorities, suggesting a deal. "You hire Cassidy as an express guard," he said, "and he and his bunch will protect your lines against future robbers." This was the same policy followed by ranchers: hire the rustlers as cowhands. Since they never hustled a boss, they'd use their private branding irons on others. The plan sounded like cheap protection to the robbery-plagued UP and the meeting with Cassidy was all set-until the storm botched it up. Maybe it's not too surprising that during the following August the Wild Bunch blew up a UP baggage car midway between Rawlins and Rock Springs and slipped away with a reported $55,000! The outlaw dynasty led by George LeRoy Parker, alias Butch Cassidy, flourished during the 1875-1905 period. These were dynamic, explosive laissez faire years when greed and need brought the best and the worst in men... years when the frontier spirit of the Old West created its own law and its own code of honor, even among thieves. Perhaps because of his unique "code of honor," Butch Cassidy emerges, eighty years after his heyday, as more hero than anti-hero, still fondly regarded by his many biographers, even in this debunking era of the 1970's. Subject of the successful film named for him and his partner Harry Longabaugh (the Sundance Kid), this popular renegade sprang from a background of sturdy Mormon pioneers. To further their colonizing of the West, the Mormons had converted and recruited skilled workers from abroad. One of these was a prosperous English weaver named Robert Parker, who in 1856 emigrated with his family to lowa City, Iowa, the push-off point for the new Zion.

So successful had been the recruiting venture that there were not enough wagon trains for the trip west. Hastily piling their belongings onto hand-drawn carts, the immigrant Handcart Pioneers trekked the 1,000 miles across plains and mountains to Salt Lake City. One historian writes that Robert Parker died in a snow-choked mountain pass during the odyssey. His wife and oldest son, twelve-year-old Maximilian, "scratched a shallow trench in the snow, laid him away as best they could, and pushed on to Zion, their grief dulled by cold and starvation." Like much of the documentation on the much-documented Parker history, this account is probably more heart-rending than historic. Pearl Baker, a contemporary and respected biographer, says the family arrived in Mormon headquarters before snowfall and moved on to American Falls where Parker became a school teacher. At any rate, by the mid-1860's Maximilian had married and on April 13, 1866, became the father of George LeRoy, the eldest in a family of seven children. When George was twelve, the family bought a ranch near Circleville, Utah, an easy distance from the remote and rugged area now called Bryce Canyon National Park. These were the days when ranches were open houses to traveler and rustler alike. Doors were never locked. If a house was empty, the rider helped himself to some food, left a coin if he had one, and moved on. The close-mouthed pioneers, knowing they too might need a helping hand one day, offered acceptance and hospitality with few questions asked. Before the Parkers bought their ranch, it had been such a stopping place for a traveler-rustler named Mike Cassidy and his boys. Mike hired on as a cowhand for the new owner. It was Cassidy who educated the young George LeRoy Parker in the how-to's of the West--roping, riding, branding and gunslinging. If environment meant anything, it was not surprising that George was an apt pupil. Oldtimers of the area alleged that at least half of the residents of Circle Valley were rustlers. They looked upon their trade as a way of life no more or less disreputable than that of the land, mine and railroad barons. The rustlers' attitude was that these ruthless tycoons had built their fortunes unhampered by law; shouldn't a man trying to make a living have the same opportunity? From a practical standpoint, rustling was a necessity for the new settler who tried to carve out an outfit of his own. Oldtimers spared no holds when it came to dealing with the unwelcome new squatters. But despite the ranchers' efforts to protect themselves, cattle and mavericks on the open range were fair game for the quick lariat and big iron. Young Parker, then, probably felt no qualms about going on the rustle. By the time he was sixteen, he had won a reputation as one of the best shots in the valley. Two years later the compactly built teenager--5'9", 155 pounds--took off on his own to a new life and a new name. He called himself George Cassidy, in honor of his old friend, who by now had left for less sheriff-infested country. When and how George became "Butch" is a matter of some disagreement. Some say he did a stint as a butcher; others maintain he was thrown into a creek by the recoil of a gun--a gun called "Butch"--while a bunch of joshing cowhands looked on. Whatever its source, the nickname was to appear on many

a "Wanted" poster in the next thirty years. Butch's first reported arrest came for theft of a saddle when he was still a boy. Some say his treatment in jail may have led to his career in crime. Possibly, but certainly there were other contributing factors, not the least of which was the youth's own adventure-loving personality. That facet of his nature and an underlying sense of fair play were illustrated in his next fracas with the law. Arrested for horse theft, Butch was being escorted across the desert to the nearest pokey when he grabbed one of his captor's guns, took their keys, unlocked his handcuffs and rode off with their horses. Down the trail a bit, he noticed their canteens still hanging on the saddles, and as legend tells it, he turned back to return the water for the law's long walk to town. A popular outlaw, who is recalled as fun-loving, friendly, courteous to women and kind to children, Cassidy was kind of a western Robin Hood. He never robbed an individual--impersonal banks, trains, and corporate payrolls were his usual targets. He served only one prison sentence, never killed a man (at least in this country), and never drank to excess. Cassidy was a cut above the average hoodlum types of his time--the Jesse Jameses and the Wyatt Earps. And, as western buffs like to point out, even the average hood of that era was several cuts above the bombers and hijackers of today. After striking out on his own, the young Cassidy went to work in the Telluride, Colorado, mines. There he met Tom MeCatry, already an outlaw, and his brother-in-law, Matt Warner. They were to become the "Invincible Three." Their fwst big coup was the Telluride Bank Robbery. Butch obviously prepared for the hit well in advance. He had been in the booming mining town for a month and was seen training his horse to stand motionless while he mounted at a run. Then the horse would take off and run for a mile at full speed. On June 24, 1889, armed and wearing bandannas over their faces, Warner and Cassidy made off with $21,000 or $10,500, depending upon whose story you choose to believe. The tale also varies as to what happened after the robbery, but it seems clear that a posse did pursue the men out of town. One storyteller relates that a particularly aggressive member of the posse suddenly found himself dangerously close to the desperadoes and might have come within firing range of the crack shots. But he was saved by the "call of nature." A newspaper story after the event said the robbers covered the trail by padding their horses' feet with gunny sacks and riding over rocks. Tom McCarty said later that once when the posse neared them, they lassoed a wandering Indian pony, tied a large branch to its tail and sent the pony plunging down the mountain slope toward the pursuers. Thinking they were being attacked by an "army of men," the posse and their horses stampeded downhill, once again losing their quarry. After knocking off a train at Stony Creek in July, the three eventually wound up at Robbers Roost in south-eastern Utah, a favorite sanctuary of renegades on the run. One day when Butch rode fifty miles into Greenriver for supplies, a sheriff named Fares reportedly recognized him and followed

him out to arrest the gang. As Matt Warner told it, they relieved him of his guns and sent him home without pants and horse. Some time after this Butch split from his two henchmen to become a foreman on an Opal, Wyoming, ranch. He later was described as the best man the owner ever had. A bunkmate, George Streeter, called Butch a top hand, the best-natured man he'd ever met and a crack shot. Describing Butch as a short, thick man, he said the new hand could "ride around a tree full speed and empty a six-gun into the tree, putting every shot within a three-inch circle." In 1892 Butch picked up a new partner, Al Hainer, and the two started a ranching operation near Lander. This was wild country where stray livestock was easily taken, and it was later noted that these new neighbors did a lot of selling but little buying. In June of1893 the partners were arrested for horse theft but were acquitted that same month. Cassidy's fourth and last arrest was recorded in 1894. In an apparent frame-up arranged by local ranchers, Butch and Hainer were accused of stealing a horse which the so-called owner had stolen and sold to them for $5. The Utah Historical Society says that a Deputy Claverly and an assistant arrested Hairier and Cassidy, but not before Butch had suffered a pistol slug through his scalp during a savage gun battle and "was subdued only when the barrel of Claverly's pistol crashed into and fractured his jaw. "Sentiment was mixed in Lander, as it was all over the West at that time in such cases," the report continues. "Cassidy was a friendly, likeable man. The town had known him well, had liked him we!l, and he had done little more than steal a few horses." But he was convicted and sent to the Wyoming penitentiary on July 15, 1894. He was pardoned by Governor Richards in January, 1896, after promising he would stay clear of Wyoming operations in the future. Whether it was the prison stint or simply the normal evolution of his life, Butch Cassidy was now a traveler of the Outlaw Trail. The longest, wildest and most-used in western history, the renegade route ran from Montana to Mexico. Along the trail were stopovers and hideouts for the outlaws. The northern-most station was in Montana. Others were located at Hole-in-the-Wall, Wyoming, Brown's Hole, Robbers Roost in Utah, Lee's Ferry in Arizona, and in New Mexico. At Brown's Hole the newly-released ex-con began to organize his fabled Wild Bunch. A "hole" in western vernacular is any valley surrounded by mountains. Brown's Hole was such a place, a thirty-five-mile area along the Green River at the junctions of Utah, Colorado and Wyoming. With only three steep, rocky trails leading down from its enclosure of lofty precipices, it was an ideal sanctuary for the lawless. It was a rare lawman who ever attempted to enter the Hole. With outlaws guarding its narrow entrances or lurking in caves and cabins along the way, the Hole was no place for the law. For his most trusted lieutenant the intelligent Cassidy chose Ellsworth "Elza" Lay, a handsome, well-educated easterner who reportedly took to the trails after an incident with a drunk in Denver. The drunk was trying to molest a woman on a horse car. Lay saw him and pitched him onto the street with such force that the culprit appeared dead. The frightened Lay took off

and some time later showed up at Brown's Hole. By the time he met Butch, he had pulled several jobs on his own and having served his apprenticeship, he was ready to join forces with a pro. Butch and Elza built a "roost," a small cabin on a high point of Diamond Mountain. They spent that first winter there with Elza's wife, Maude, and Butch's girl, Etta Place. A beautiful woman, Etta enjoyed a colorful reputation among her neighbors who said she'd shucked a husband or two and left two children to run off with Butch. And well she might have, for Butch was quite a catch. Cassidy was a sharp dresser when he had money. He was good company in any gathering, bubbling over with dry humor. He and his fellow "roosters" were a lively group, who worked at deserving their nickname, the Wild Bunch. They attended the dances in the valley and were known for their practical jokes and general tomfoolery when the occasion warranted. Etta and Butch were hardly "steadies," though. He spent a lot of time with another woman named Josie Bassett that winter, and Etta later joined forces with the Sundance Kid, as depicted in the recent film. Cassidy and Lay's first big job together was the Montpelier Bank Robbery, which took place on August 13, 1896. Assisted by another rooster, Bob Meeks, they "withdrew" $7,165. With fresh relays of horses waiting on the getaway route, Butch and Elza escaped unscathed. Meeks, however, whose only role was to hold the horses outside the bank, was later identified by a bank employee and spent several years behind bars. For a while Butch and Elza holed up at Robbers Roost, another favorite hideaway of the Wild Bunch. This was roughly 300 miles south of Brown's Hole. Robbers Roost was an elevated plateau in the high desert of southeastern Utah. Even today there are only three trails into the arid fastnesses of the Roost. Only three or four springs water the area, and its approaches are more dangerous than in any other area of the state. From the Roost the outlaws could look from forty to sixty miles in any direction across vistas of red and gold sand slashed by steep, raw canyons. Despite the fact that Pinkerton detectives were constantly on the trail of the desperadoes, any accurate chronological accounting of Butch's activities is impossible. But it is known that on April 21, 1897, Cassidy engineered the Castlegate Payroll Robbery to the tune of $8,000, which he split with Elza Lay and Joe Walker. This job was Cassidy at his efficient best. Castlegate was rich local mining country midway between Brown's Hole and Robbers Roost. The closest law enforcement was eight miles away at Price. This location figured in the outlaw's careful planning. Joe Walker was instructed to stay outside of town and cut the telegraph wires just before the heist. Knowing the proximity of the outlaw hideouts in the Castlegate region and the frequency of the loosely-knit gang's forays against banks and trains, the mining authorities were careful. The payroll came into town on the noon train, was picked up there by the paymaster and carried up an outdoor stairway to the company office on the second floor of a main street store building. Horses, the only possible means of travel for Butch and EIza, were scarce

in Castlegate and two strangers on saddled mounts would have been more than a little suspect. Therefore, according to Butch's plan, they stripped the horses of saddles and passed themselves off as race horse owners who had ridden in during their exercise rounds. What their guns had to do with exercise apparently went unquestioned. The two waited until the paymaster, E. L. Carpenter, neared the foot of the stairway before they demanded the money. He carried a satchel bearing $7,000 in $20 gold pieces and two sacks, one containing silver and currency amounting to over $1,000 and another holding $850 in small coins. The coin bag was so heavy that it was abandoned. Butch and Elza made it out of town without firing their guns, although a few rifle shots dusted their heels. Posses were subsequently sent out from two nearby towns, but with fresh horses waiting trailside and a couple of swaps with ranchers enroute, the robbers soon rendezvoused with Joe Walker. Figuring they would be less suspicious if not carrying too much money, they transferred the take to Walker's saddlebags and sent him north toward Florence Creek and Brown's Park. They were to join him there in a few days when the dust had settled. In the meantime Cassidy and Lay laid a more obvious trail toward Robbers Roost while the two posses converged behind them. As it turned out, the posses wound up trailing each other, thinking they were closing in on the outlaws. They closed in, all right, and a rousing gun battle took place at dusk between the two groups, each assuming the other consisted of the wanted men. Luckily, their marksmanship precluded physical damage. It was reported that Pete Burson fired a double-barreled shotgun at Old Joe Meeks from fourteen steps away, missing not only Joe but also his horse. After a few days at the Roost, Butch and EIza headed for Brown's Hole to split the money with the partner who awaited them. From there they turned south toward New Mexico to allow a cooling off period in Utah and elsewhere. In New Mexico Butch took the name Jim Lowe and Lay became William Maginnis. They went to work for the WS Cattle Company in Alma for a time until the Pinkerton men began poking around once more. The WS spread was managed by Capt. William French, who didn't mind when Butch hired as hands several of his Wild Bunch. Later French wrote about Cassidy and Lay: "Jim Lowe was a stocky man of medium build, fair complexioned. He had a habit of grinning and showing a row of small, even teeth when he talked." Maginnis, he said, was younger, tall, swaggerer. Their cowhand friends were seemed unlimited in number. They came always others ready to sign on at the dark, good looking and a bit of a orderly in the town saloons and and went at will, but there were WS.

Meantime, the Spanish American War began, and many an outlaw, as patriotic as the next man, volunteered. There was even some talk of forming a Wild Bunch Brigade. As the war escalated, so did beef prices and rustling. On July 11, 1899, at Folsom, New Mexico, another Cassidy-style robbery took place. Although Cassidy may have been involved in the planning, Lay and others did the job. A sheriff was killed in the resultant shootout, and Lay

was badly wounded and arrested. He was convicted and put away until 1906. In prison Lay helped to quell two prison riots and consequently became quite a favorite of New Mexico Governor Otero, who reduced his sentence. Apparently Lay had $50,000 stashed away from earlier robberies. With this he operated a saloon for a while in Shoshoni, Wyoming, then married and moved to Calexico, California. He died in Los Angeles in 1934 and is buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery. Perhaps it was Lay's arrest that led Butch to make his abortive attempt at the straight life when he sought employment with the Union Pacific. But the gods were against it. Butch now joined up with the Sundance Kid, Harry Longabaugh, from Sundance, Arizona. On September 19, 1900, hoping for a new start in South America, they swooped down on another bank. With Bill Carver, another top rider from the Wild Bunch, they held up the Winnemucca Bank in Nevada. They picked up $32,640 and headed for Fort Worth, Texas, to celebrate. In Fort Worth the well-heeled trio met two other members of the Bunch, decked themselves out in modish duds and had a group picture taken in a classic formal pose. Butch thoughtfully sent a copy of the photo to the Winnemucca Bank, thanking the authorities for their contribution. An enlargement of the photo still hangs in the bank. With a comfortable amount of cash in their pockets, Cassidy and Sundance looked wistfully toward South America. Early in 1902 Sundance, with Butch's old girlfriend Etta Place now his constant companion, met Butch in New York City. After doing the town, they sailed to Buenos Aires, later settling on a ranch near the Chilean border. In his biography of Cassidy, The Outlaw Trail, Charles Kelly says Cassidy. and Longabaugh "terrorized the country on both sides of the Andes and became the most wanted outlaws in South America." Kelly presents a dramatic account, much like that in the film, of an ambush by a Bolivian cavalry unit. According to this story the Americans had left their rifles with their saddles outside a tavern where they had stopped for a drink. With only hand guns and little ammunition, they were lost. Sundance was mortally wounded before Cassidy reportedly used his last two bullets to shoot first his partner and then himself. There is much that is incredible about this tale, not the least of which is that two wily, wanted criminals would let themselves be separated from their principal weapons. At any rate, writer Pearl Baker, in The Wild Bunch at Robbers Roost, states with certainty that Butch and Sundance did return to the states and that Cassidy may have died in Oregon in 1937. After the film made Sundance famous, a man came forth who says the outlaw was his father and calls himself Harry Longabaugh, Jr. The younger man, who has lectured about his father and his cohorts in several western states, says he saw Butch Cassidy in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in 1933 and learned that the two men who died in Bolivia were not our famous duo. Butch and Sundance had been in the town that day, he said, but they took off after the shooting.

According to Fern Lyon, writing in the November-December 1973 issue of New Mexico magazine, the younger Longabaugh said his father died in Casper, Wyoming, in 1958 at the age of 98. Etta Place reportedly died in Oregon in 1949. Thus it appears that Butch Cassidy might fillally have managed to leave the outlaw trail and to find a more comfortable path to anonymity in his old age. He had been looking for obscurity that snowy day when he waited for the Union Pacific men at Lost Soldier Pass. But for the weather, he might have succeeded, and one of the most colorful chapters in the history of the Wild West might never have been written.

ELFEGO BACA : THE "BAD" MAN OF SOCORRO by Steve Ross The year was 1884 and a lone boy of nineteen was holed up in a small jacal in the town of Francisco, New Mexico. He was an American of Mexican descent, not a safe thing to be in the years after the Civil War when Texans, their hearts still full of frustrated fight, were spilling into the area, taking Over at the point of a gun and abusing Mexicans, considerin~ them as non-people who simply had to be gotten out of the way so the Texans could have free use of the country as rangeland for their cattle. Eighty Texas cowboys had been firing into the jacal for a day and a night. Over three hundred bullet holes were later to be counted in the door alone. Over 4,000 rounds would be fired into the tiny house before the shoot-out was over. From his besieged position, the boy had already killed and wounded a number of the Texans. Late that night, dynamite had been thrown at the house, caving in a third of the structure. The cowboys had poured many more rounds into the remaining part of the structure for good measure, and then camped around the house waiting for dawn to go in and pick up the remains. When the first rays of sunlight illuminated the jacal, they were amazed at the smoke rising from the crumbling remains of the chimney. Inside, Elfego Baca was making himself breakfast! In the borrowed jacal, Elfego had found beef, coffee and corn meal. He had made tortillas from the corn meal, and was leisurely fortifying himself with a good meal in preparation for another day of fighting. Later, a cowboy was to claim in court that a loaded .45 aimed point-blank at Elfego Baca and fired until empty would have no effect upon the life of the young Chicano. The story behind this shoot-out, and other incidents in the life of Elfego Baca, would make him a living legend in the Southwest. A startling illustration of the respect which he had engendered in his part of the country, from his boyhood on, is the unique manner in which he began to carry out his duties as sheriff of Socorro County, New Mexico. In 1919, at the age of 54, he was elected to that position. Upon taking office he did a singular thing, with singular results. It was surprising to newcomers to the area, but not to anyone who knew anything about the life and exploits of the man. What he did was assemble all outstanding arrest warrants and write a note to the subject of each informing him that he, Elfego Baca, was expecting the wanted man to turn himself in. Many on the wanted list were desperados whose respect for the law was nil, and whose attendance at a sheriffs office on their own volition was hard to imagine.

It took a little time for the word to reach some of them, but within a relatively short period of time, each recipient of a note appeared at Baca's office as directed! He was born in 1865 in the town of Socorro near the place where his father had a small cattle ranch. Life was risky business for a "Mexican," with Texans aggressively moving into the area. The battle of the Alamo in 1836 still engendered bitterness in the hearts of Texans. And then there were the economic reasons Texans had for paying little attention to the rights of the native population. The power in the area soon fell to the Anglos. Law and order depended more on who had more men and guns to back him than on judicial niceties. The Baca ranch failed and the family (Francisco and Juanita, and their sons Abdenago and Elfego) moved to Topeka, Kansas. Things were a little more civilized there. There was less prejudice toward Mexicans, and the sons could have the opportunity of better schooling. Francisco did well as a small contractor for fourteen years. Then Juanita died, and Francisco, feeling lonely and homesick, decided to move back to New Mexico to be near the large Baca clan. The fifteen-year-old Elfego and his older brother went on ahead to stay with an uncle in Socorro while their father wound up his business affairs. It was during this time that Elfego briefly came in contact with Henry McCarty, alias William Bonney, alias Billy the Kid. They seemed to have hit it off and were friendly for a short period of time. Soon, his father was back in New Mexico and obtained the job of marshal in the town of Belen, Socorro County, not far from the town of Socorro. In the performance of his duties, Francisco one day found himself in a gun battle with two cowboys from the area of Los Lunas. When the smoke cleared, both cowboys were dead. Francisco had not started the fight; he was the local peace officer; he was being shot at with intent to kill--nevertheless, he was a "Mexican" who had killed two "white" men. With the help of other Anglos, the nmrshal from Los Lunas came and arrested Francisco for murder. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to a long prison term. Elfego, now seventeen, thought it unfair. And it was about this time that he began thinking about being a lawman himself. Someone, he felt, had to right some of the injustices which were being perpetrated--especially against his people, the Mexican-Americans. His goal, he determined, was to become an "A-1 peace officer and a criminal lawyer." In the meantime, he had no intention of allowing his father to languish in jail. Quickly, before his father could be moved to a state prison, he made his move. He and a friend went to the local jail in Los Lunas where his father was still being held. It was the night of a fiesta, and everyone including the jailers were celebrating. Elfego and his friend found a ladder which they used to obtain access to the second floor courtroom above the jail. Then they sawed a hole in the floor and pulled Francisco to freedom. Francisco headed south and remained free for the rest of his days. It was believed that the escape was the work of Elfego, but nothing could be proved and the matter was dropped. Only in later years did Elfego admit the details and the truth of the story. Two years later, Elfego was involved in the incident which established his reputation. Socorro, the county seat, was a rough town not unaccustomed to violence and bloodshed. But the worst place in the county was the small town of Francisco. It was in the middle of a vast area of range country which had mostly been taken over by Texans. The law was the six-shooter,

and the amusement of the cowboys was victimizing the Mexican townspeople in whatever way their imagination could conceive. Shooting up the town every weekend had become a tradition with them. The conflicts of the time were in sharp focus in and around Francisco: Anglo versus Mexican, Texan versus New Mexican, cowboy versus farmer, cowboy versus townsman. In Socorro, Elfego was working for a relative who owned a small store. He was already admired for his sharpshooting with a six gun, and his light duties at the store included protection of the owner and property. One day, a store owner, Pedro Sarracino from Francisco, showed up in Socorro and told the awful tale of a Mexican having been castrated by Texans just for the fun of it--right in Sarracino's store, on his counter. He had been threatened with his life if he tried to interfere and a man named Martinez, who had tried to stop it, had been tied to a tree and shot. Sarracino was afraid to return to Francisco, and asked Elfego for help. Elfego found a badge of a mail-order variety and pinned it to his vest. He took his two Colt six-shooters with him and accompanied Sarracino back to Francisco. He spent a day observing the goings on, which were abominable from the point of view of the native population. He then appealed to the local Alcalde (Justice of the Peace) who refused to do anything for fear of his life, and who rejected Eftego's offer of help. At that moment, a cowboy named McCarty from the famous Slaughter Ranch was in the process of shooting up the town and generally terrorizing the townspeople. Elfego, guns drawn, went up to McCarty, who was surrounded by his friends, and arrested him. He brought the man to the Alcalde who, even more fearful than before, refused to hear the case. Elfego decided to take his prisoner to Socorro in the morning, to be tried there, and bedded down for the night in the Sarracino house. Before long the word had spread, and the foreman of the Slaughter outfit, accompanied by many of his men, showed up at the Sarracino house demanding the release of Elfego's prisoner. Elfego stepped outside and informed them that he would start firing at the count of three if they did not disperse. They were amazed at his effrontery and could not believe that he meant it. The foreman, on his horse, moved up aggressively toward Elfego. They would call his "bluff." Elfego responded true to an edict he had set for himself, and to which he held throughout his life: "Never say you are going to do something unless you intend to do it." At the count of three, he opened fire. He was not then shooting to kill. He wounded one man in the leg, and shot the foreman's horse. Unfortunately the horse reared, throwing the rider and falling on the foreman, crushing him. Now, a Texan was dying--and an upstart Mexican was challenging the Anglo might. It was a bad situation. The crowd dispersed, but only to gather reinforcements and drum up hatred. Scores of cowboys were in town by morning, loaded with alcohol and bullets and spoiling for a fight. To avoid more bloodshed, some cooler-headed Anglos arranged with Elfego to have McCarty tried in town by an "American'" Justice of the Peace. McCarty was tried, found guilty, and fined five dollars. When Elfego stepped out of the building where the trial had been held, he was confronted by a mob of Texans, He quickly slipped away to a nearby house whose Mexican-American occupants he convinced would be safer elsewhere. It was a small jacal made of upright posts. The cracks between the posts were idled with mud, much of which had fallen away. This was an

advantage for Elfego because he could use the narrow crocks between the posts as firing ports--he could see, and fire, in all directions through these openings. The mob advanced on the jacal and demanded that the "dirty little Mexican" come out--to be lynched. The man in the lead went up to the door and claimed he'd bring Elfego out himself. He was dropped by two bullets. As his friends carried him away, Eftego held his fire. He was still not shooting to kill, and made no attempt to finish off the wounded man or pick off the vulnerable cowboys carrying away the wounded man. But then the Texans took up positions around the house and began pouring in bullets. For the rest of that day, that night, and part of the following day--thirty-six hours--Elfego held off eight Texans trying their damned best to kill him. It took steely nerves and a sharp eye, to stay alive in that situation. Elfego was also aided by the fact that the inside dirt floor of the jacal was more than a foot lower than the level of the ground outside the house. He could lie prone in that shelter when the fire was heavy, then get up to pick off more venturesome attackers. At one point, burning torches were thrown on the roof of the house to burn him out. But the dirt roof would not catch fire. During the night, dynamite was thrown at the house, but by now the cowboys were so in awe of Baca's staying power and sharp eye that no one would approach in the night to ascertain whether he was alive or dead. It was decided to wait for dawn to check the house. At dawn they saw the smoke from Elfego's breakfast rising from the chimney. Finally, late in the afternoon, a truce was declared and a deputy sheriff, accompanied by Francisco Naranjo, a native of Francisco whom Baca trusted, came close to the jacal to palaver with Elfego. Elfego agreed to accept arrest by the sheriff only if he were allowed to continue to carry his guns. This was agreed to and Baca, the "prisoner," walked alongside the sheriff with a hand on each gun ready for anything. He was accompanied to Socorro by the sheriff, and it was understood by all that if anyone tried to interfere it would mean the instant death of the sheriff, in Socorro, among friends, he agreed to surrender his guns and he jailed awaiting trial. He could have broken out easily with the help of friends, but chose not to. After a long and involved trial, he was fully acquitted. One year later, he made a play which indicated the reputation he had already acquired. He again took on a town single-handedly, but this time without bloodshed. A Baca named Conrado, owner of a combination store and saloon in a nearby mining and cow town called Kelly, came to Socorro to appeal to Elfego for help. His place was being taken over by miners and cowboys who were helping themselves to whatever they wanted. They would point a pistol in Conrado's face when he asked for payment. Elfego said he would accompany Conrado back to Kelly. But Conrado refused to return for fear of his life, and elected to wait in Socorro until Elfego came back with news that it was safe to return. Elfego set out alone. When he got to the store-saloon in Kelly, he found miners and cowboys making themselves at home, taking shots at various fixtures and draining the liquor supply. He stood at the end of the bar for several minutes sizing up the situation. Then, placing his hands on his two Colts, ready for action, he announced in a loud voice that the festivities had come to an end. This brought a reaction of disbelief and anger, and guns were reached for. Elfego quickly drew his guns. Outnumbered about forty to one, he stood waiting for a move

on their part. It was a tense situation. "Who the hell are you? snarled one of the miners. "I am Elfego Baca." The effect of this statement was extraordinary. The men turned sheepish and apologetic. They claimed they were just having a little fun, that they didn't mean any harm and would pay for all damages and merchandise consumed. During the next few years, Elfego was a deputy sheriff and deputy United States marshal. He collected enough scars from knife cuts and bullet wounds to attest to the daring and dedication with which he performed his duties. By 1890, he decided to enter another phase of law. He began reading law in the office of a Socorro judge with whom he was on good terms, and four years later he was admitted to the New Mexico bar. His career as a lawyer was as colorful as his earlier, and later, career as a law enforcer. Courtroom decorum meant little to him when he felt injustice was being done. Often the injustices involved Mexican-Americans whose rights he had vowed to protect. With some judges, and opposing counsel, he got along fine; others came to fear his presence in court. If a judge ordered him out of court for disrespect, Elfego not only would not retire, but no court officer moved to carry out the judge's demand that he be removed. Elfego's reputation remained such that there were few who dared tangle with him personally. On one occasion, intensely angered by the behavior of a judge in a particular case, he openly called the judge-in a full courtroom--"corrupt and personally immoral." This estimate proved to be more than mere hyperbole. That judge was soon after removed from office for the very reasons Elfego had mentioned. He involved himself in local politics, and at one time or another held the offices of Mayor of Socorro, County School Superintendent, county clerk, assistant district attorney and district attorney. During these years he took some time off to track down a Mexican cattle rustler who had ventured north of the border to raid. There was a sizeable reward and Elfego was tempted by the money and the adventure. He trailed the rustler into old Mexico, and was about ready to confront him when word reached Baca that the reward had been cancelled. Well, if they didn't want him that badly, Elfego concluded, there was no reason for him to bother about it. Since he ,had gone that far, he decided to introduce himself to the rustler, who had a fearsome reputation in those parts--Pancho Villa. They took a liking to each other, and for a short time were partners in an unprofitable mining venture. After his return to New Mexico, Baca was to hear from Villa again--friendly for a brief time, then decidedly hostile. During the days of 1910-1911, when Madero's revolution ousted Porf'mo Diaz, there was much excitement south of the border. Elfego decided to see for himself what it was all about. Through his friendship with Villa, he met Madero and Generals Carranza, Huerta, Orozco, and Salazar, and was an observer of some of the battles and quarrels which developed among the revolutionists themselves. When Huerta became president of Mexico several years later, he named Baca as his American representative and engaged Elfego as attorney to represent General Salazar who had fled across the border after defeat in battle. Salazar was being held by American

authorities for violation of American neutrality, free him. Villa, now an enemy of Huerta, swore he becoming a Huerta man. Given Villa's temperament, the border and his many ardent sympathizers north an idle threat.

and it was Baca's job to would kill Baca for his frequent raids across of the border, it was not

Elfego was unable to do anything for Salazar through legal channels. It was then that there occurred an incident involving a most interesting coincidence, it led to rampant SPeculation among those who knew Baca. Salazar was being held at the Bernalillo County jail in Albuquerque. One evening, two masked men overpowered the jailer, freed Salazar and, without doubt headed south of the border. They made good their escape. The coincidence is that at the exact time of the jailbreak, Elfego was in an Albuquerque bar having a drink and repeatedly asking several respected local citizens the time. His watch kept stopping every few minutes, it seemed, and he needed to ask the time in order to reset it. When a charge of being involved in the jailbreak was considered against him, his firmly established presence elsewhere nullified any further action against him. He further managed to anger Villa in a personal way by arranging, in a complicated and still not fully known way, to obtain one of several custom-made rifles which Villa had had made especially for himself. Villa offered a reward of $30,000 for the return of his rifle and the death of Elfego Baca. The reward was never collected, and Baca retained the rifle for the rest of his life. Throughout his career, Elfego was constantly getting into scrapes, each of which would make a story in itself. Once, in El Paso, he was confronted by a man named Otero who had a grudge against Baca. The man fired, slightly wounding Baca in the groin. Elfego quickly returned the fire, killing the man. Elfego was treated by a doctor and then taken to a friend's house where he called the El Paso chief of police. He was informed that he would have to stand trial for the killing. "Come yourself," he told the chief of police. "If you send some cop who tries to get rough with me, you know what'Il happen to him" The chief himself came to get Baca, and an El Paso jury later acquitted him. There was in Elfego's personality a fascinating combination of daring, personal sense of justice, and humor. Earlier in his life when his cousin Conrado had asked for his help in ridding Conrado's unwanted guests from his business establishment in Kelly, Elfego had been so annoyed by Conrado's fearful refusal to accompany him back to Kelly that he did a puckish thing the day after his confrontation with the miners and cowboys. He declared an "open house" and invited anyone to come and take whatever they wanted from the shelves for that day. Later in his life, when he was sheriff of Socorro County, he was annoyed by a new law which put debtors in jail until they could pay their debts. Often, the debts were small amounts, and Elfego's jail was filled with poor people who, he reasoned, could never get around to paying their debts while locked up. And they were an expense to the county, often far beyond the sums they owed. He took it upon himself to allow all debtors to go free and told the infuriated district attorney that he would refuse to reincarcerate any of the debtors who would be reapprehended and brought back and would not jail any new debtors brought to him. As a result of this action and the controversy and reevaluation it caused, the law was repealed at the next session of the legislature. Late in his life, he moved to Albuquerque. Out walking one day, he became incensed when he observed a policenmn roughing up a Mexican-American whom

Baca happened to know. He pulled out his large silver watch attached to a long chain and swung the chain, crashing the watch across the policeman's head. He was arrested and sentenced to thirty days in jail. He calmly allowed himself to be taken to the local jail where he entered his name as prisoner and then released himself on his own recognizance. Unknown yet to the judge, Elfego had just days before obtained the new job of jailer. After a long and eventful life, he died peacefully in Albuquerque. in August, 1945, the Albuquerque Tribune carried the headline: ELFEGO BACA, OLD FRONTIER LINK, GUNFIGHT HERO, DIES HERE AT 80

BLACK BART : THE POET BANDIT by Arthur Moore San Francisco was becoming a metropolis the year Black Bart appeared. It was settling down from the hectic period of the gold rush that had started it all. The Barbary Coast still had its course to run, but civilization was creeping closer. The popular get-rich-quick idea had evaporated; people were willing to work for wages again or to start their own businesses. The railroad had come across the Rockies and it looked at last as if the land would be conquered and stable one day soon. The once riotous and wild gold mining camps of California were abandoned, or had grown from camps to small villages and towns. The gold rush had been ebbing fast by 1854. When the placers were worked out, rnany of them by 1860, men moved on. A few had struck it rich and kept what they had made, most returned home or put the shovels and picks aside and became, carpenters or farmers again. A great many ex-gold mining camps were destroyed by fire and some by flood. There were still mines, to be sure, but after the financial depression of 1855, farming and ranching became more important. The saloonkeepers, gamblers and hangers-on departed, leaving the land in the hands of more permanent residents. The soil was good, rainfall plentiful and the climate generally mild. Farming and ranching had been the life of California before the transients, and now it returned to put down even deeper roots. John A. Sutter, the man who had tried to suppress the news of the discovery of gold, was the real founder of agriculture in the state. With the immense jump in population food prices spiraled upward. Growing food quickly became far more profitable than digging for gold. Many forty-niners bought land with gold and began seeding and plowing. Twenty-five years after the gold rush started there was hardly any trace of it remaining. Then one day Black Bart came along. The year was 1875, only one year before Custer met all those Indians at the Little Big Horn. It was Calaveras County--the very same one Mark Twain made famous with his jumping frog story. Black Bart took up his chosen profession as stage robber. He was to become the most unique practitioner of that calling in the West. The West, and long-suffering Wells Fargo in particular, had seen many a stage robber. Most were unimaginative types who were often vicious and

always greedy. The Butterfield Overland Mail & Express stages had been fighting the problem for years. All too often their drivers had been shot off the boxes without warning. The passengers were routinely robbed and molested, sometimes the team horses stolen or destroyed. How Black Bart went into stage robbing is not known. He served no apprenticeship--he always worked alone--and the method he devised for his first job was never changed. Except once, but more of that later. He was unfailingly polite. To stage drivers he had only two commands. The first: "Throw down the box!" spoken in a deep, authoritative voice. When that was done, he ordered, "Get along," and the stagecoach got moving again. There were a few times when women passengers, frightened by his odd appearance and the weapon he held, tossed out to him their purses. Black Bart never failed to return them, saying he wanted only the mail bags and the strong boxes. He never robbed or touched a single passenger. Even more unusual, he never once fired his shotgun in the commission of any robbery. Later, during a frantic scramble during one holdup, Bart was fired upon by a driver. But he did not return the fire. Maybe the shotgun was not loaded ... ? He was a most peculiar little man. His modus operandi was simple. He would take up station along a lonely stretch of stage road, always on a difficult hill where the stage had to go slowly, or on a sharp bend. He wore a linen duster over his clothes and a flour sack with cut-out eyeholes over his head and over his derby hat. He carried a double-barreled shotgun. When the horse drawn stage appeared he would step out quickly, the shotgun held steady, and call out his command. Usually he placed himself in front of the horses, stooping to make a smaller target in case the driver attempted to fire at him. In general the drivers of the twenty-seven stages he robbed were happy to kick the treasure box off into the road and to whip up the horses. Black Bart then used an old axe to break open the wooden express box. He had to go rnany miles to get to the stages--and many miles back, not counting the danger. And for all his work he was poorly recompensed. He had come on this avocation late in life, and had missed the boat, so to speak. The mines were few now; the days of the richly-laden stages had passed. None of Bart's robberies netted him very much. His last was the biggest haul, but that was mostly recovered by Wells Fargo. His immediate successes and his appearance--the duster and flour sack were unmistakable--made him known to all. The newspapers happily went to work with suppositions and conjectures. In a few years they had built Black Bart to the skies, a fantastic pyramid of pure fantasy. He was invincible, nine feet tall and bulletproof. Wells Fargo's chief of detectives, James B. Hume--an ex-sheriff of El Dorado County--was cudgeling his brains over the few real clues he had. The trouble was that Black Bart did not fit any of the molds. He was not vicious or violent, and he came and went like a spirit. But there was one thing more--the thing that really made him famous and endeared him to the hearts of San Franciscans and millions of others... his poetry. He signed himself Black Bart, the PO 8, clearly defining his own literary

attainments. he left only engaging and was probably

He did not a very few theatrical why he did

leave a poem every time he robbed a stage, in fact poems, but no other stage robber used such an device. It was bound to get him attention, which it. He quickly became a legend.

On the day he held up the Quincy to Oroville stage and relieved the driver of the green Wells Fargo box he left behind what became the most famous of his lines. It was written on the back of a waybill in neat, meticulous handwriting:

Here I lay me down to sleep, To wait the coming morrow; Perhaps success, perhaps defeat, And everlasting sorrow. 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. Let come what may, I'll try it on, My condition can't be worse, And if there's money in that box, 'Tis money in my purse.

The discovery of gold in California was the spark that fired Henry Wells and William G. Fargo to form the historic company. Wells Fargo & Company started in New York City, March 18, 1852. It proposed to compete with the Adams Express and other companies in the gold fields. There were no railroads then, and so there was a desperate need for honest, dependable service. The miner simply took his gold dust to the nearest Wells Fargo branch office. An agent weighed the gold and gave the miner a receipt. That ended the miner's responsibility-and he liked it that way. Wells Fargo then became responsible for delivering it or for acting as banker. Wells Fargo's operation was an immediate success. The company's word was good as gold. The first few offices expanded into twelve in the Mother Lode, then expanded into the Comstock Lode country. It became the largest and most powerful of all express companies within a few years. By the middle 1860's Wells Fargo owned the greatest staging empire in the world. It carried goods and mail--indeed anything that could be transported. When the famous Pony Express was formed, it sent the US Mails across country from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California... in five days. Since the firm carried so much bullion, it developed its own police force to bring to justice the hundreds of bandits who sought riches the easy way... at the end of a gun. Many of these special agents were ex-lawmen, like detective Hume. James B. Hume was a diligent and careful man. He was tall and wiry, a handsome man, according to his photographs. He did his best to capture that poet stage robber, Black Bart, having no idea at first that it would be so challenging. Hume's first act was to discover if anyone besides the drivers and occasional passengers had seen the robber. He combed the hills for clues. a number of people had seen and He found that talked to a stranger on foot, a short, well-dressed man of perhaps fifty years of age, with blue deepset eyes, gray hair, moustache and chin whiskers. And he looked like a

wandering preacher or school teacher. This man was polite, people said, and talked easily Was it possible he was Black Bart? Hume decided, after considerable investigation, that it had to be. Wells Fargo issued a confidential circular on the man and his methods, describing the linen duster, the flour sack and the shotgun--not forgetting the old axe with which the bandit smashed treasure boxes. He always left the axe behind. In opening mail sacks Black Bart cut them with a sharp knife in a T slit. He had another peculiarity. In a vast land, in a time when everyone rode horses or drove buggies, Black Bart walked. He was a phenomenal walker, covering amazing distances up and down hills and across country, lugging his suitcase. He stopped various times at farmhouses and small villages and was always described by those who met him--not knowing who he was--as well-informed, pleasant and courteous. He was about five feet, seven inches, of slender build, they said, and straight as an arrow. He had a high forehead, deepset eyes, a moustache and chin whiskers. He did not drink or smoke but he liked coffee. Because of his respectable appearance he could stop for food without anyone ever suspecting him of being the notorious bandit. Once, in 1882, a Wells Fargo driver saw his chance and got in a couple of shots at him. It was on the Laporte to Oroville run. Before Black Bart got quite out of sight, the driver grabbed a gun, firing several times. The horses reared and jerked the stagecoach. No one was hurt. Black Bart disappeared into the hills. Detective Hume could not run him to earth. When he pored over the poetry, one of his few clues, Hume found them of little help. (The day of sophisticated handwriting analysis had not yet dawned.) Bart's habit was to write each line in a different way, slanting the letters forward or back and making them of different sizes, as though to discourage identification. He left his poems in the empty express boxes. They were gleefully printed by the newspapers. So here I've stood while wind and rain, Have set the trees a sobbin' And risked my life for that damned box, That wasn't worth the robbin'. He was driving the Wells Fargo detectives up the walls! The robberies went on for eight years, three or four each year. No one knows if Black Bart lived on the proceeds alone. If so he did not live high. Wells Fargo posted a reward for him, of eight hundred dollars. Then the end came quickly. About eight years after he had begun his bizarre career, at the end of 1883, Black Bart stopped the stage coming from Sonora. It is conjectured that he had information that the treasure box was filled better than usual. At any rate it contained five hundred and fifty dollars in cash, and over four thousand dollars in amalgam (a mixture of silver and mercury). He halted the stage in the same area where he had started his depredations. When the coach appeared, horses laboring up a steep hill, Black Bart stepped out as he always did, with the shotgun leveled. "Throw down the

box!" he ordered in his deep voice. But this time things had been changed. Stage driver Reason McConnell could not comply--for the simple reason that the box had been fastened to the floor of the coach! Since the bandit always demanded the drivers "throw down the box," what would happen if they could not? If the company officials came to the decision hoping it would confuse Black Bart, they were successful. The bandit was faced with the first change in his technique since the beginning and it seemed to shake him. He had to decide quickly whether to vary his method or to let the stagecoach go on by, unrobbed. He solved the problem. He commanded the driver to unhitch the team and walk the horses forward over the crest of the hill leaving the coach itself behind. (There happened that day to be no passengers.) Driver McConnell did as he was directed. However, there was one other factor in this particular holdup. A joker in the deck. That difference was a youth, Jimmy Rolleri, nineteen years old. Jimmy and McConnell were old friends. Early that morning Jimmy had decided to go hunting with his Henry rifle. He hitched a ride with his friend the stage driver, and got off as the stage started up the incline. He would cut across country, he told McConnell, looking for game along the way. He would meet the stage again as it came down the grade on the far side of the hill. Life is sprinkled with coincidences, mostly small ones of course, but occasionally a whopper comes along. This day the poet robber was faced with a doozie. He held up the stage just after Jimmy hopped down to hunt. Driver McConnell reported off the stagecoach at the McConnell replied that he strayed cattle. It seemed later that the bandit had seen the young man drop foot of the hill and demanded to know who he was. was only a young boy who was out hunting for to satisfy the highwayman.

As ordered McConnell then took the team of horses over the hill. Black Bart went to work with his axe on the treasure box inside the coach. He smashed the box open and stuffed the contents into a sack. On the other side of the hill McConnell attracted Jimmy Rolleri's attention. Jimmy slipped around the slope and, when he came up, wanted to know why McConnell was minus a stagecoach. Without wasting time on words, McConneli grabbed the rifle and rushed to the crest of the hill. Black Bart was just backing out of the coach with the loot in a sack and a bundle of papers in his hand. McConnell fired and Bart ran for the trees. Three shots were fired. Bart stumbled, dropped the papers, but disappeared into the brush. Blood was later found on the papers. McConnell did not chase the bandit. He hitched up the coach and he and Jimmy hurried to the next town to report the robbery. Sheriff Thorn of Cahveras County went out to the scene to see what he could find. Thorn was a back county lawman, but intelligent and thorough. Near the road he found a small derby hat. Behind a rock, where someone had obviously waited a long time, he found the remains of food in several paper bags, a leather case for a pair of opera glasses, a magnifying glass, a belt, a razor, some dirty linen sleeve cuffs and two flour sacks. Most important of all there was also a handkerchief, in the comer of which was an inked code: F.X. O Seven.

Chief of detectives Hume had previously hired a special investigator, Harry N. Morse, to concentrate on Black Bart. Under Hume's supervision Harry Morse had been working on the case for about six months. Now finally there was a tangible clue. Morse was given the handkerchief and told to track down the laundry mark. There were dozens of cities and towns and the laundry might be in any one of them. Morse pondered the tiny numbers on the corner of the bit of cloth and decided to try the San Francisco laundries first. He began checking and discovered there were ninety-one. Doggedly he began calling on them. It took a week. Morse examined the books of laundry after laundry. At last he found the mark F. X. O Seven on the books of a hundry agency run by Thomas Ware on Bush Street. The mark identified a customer named C. E. Bolton. Bolton, Morse found, lived in a small hotel, the Webb House, at 37 Second Street, room 40. The police set a watch on it and soon arrested the man. Bolton made no trouble; he only protested his innocence. He was found to be a man whom many city detectives knew well. He had been eating for years at a Kearny Street cafe where the police often went. Bolton had even discussed Black Bart, the notorious bandit, with them. When accused, Bolton denied he was Bart. He had been born, he said, in New York State; he was a veteran of the Union Army and had served with honor and valor in the Civil War--he called himself a captain. (He was later found to have been a sergeant.) He also had a wife in Missouri. At his hotel he was said to be an ideal tenant, quiet and punctual about his room rent. He claimed to be a mining man... but was vague about the location of his mine. Hume and his detectives were sure of him from the first. His description matched perfectly the one that Hume had uncovered years before. Bolton was a short, straight man with a gray moustache and chin whiskers. He had sunken blue eyes, high cheekbones, and he was very polite. He dressed well, liked derby hats, and wore a diamond stickpin and a diamond ring as well as a gold watch and chain. Bolton was not his real name, he admitted. He had been born Charles E. Boles. Also Bolton had a bit of skin knocked off one knuckle. He said it was because of a slight accident. Hume figured that one of driver McConnell's bullets had touched him. The derby hat found at the scene fitted him perfectly. Handwriting found in his room matched very well the handwriting on the verses written by the poet robber. They questioned the quiet little man for some time. He finally admitted he was the one who had held up McConnell. And he led them to a cache in the woods where most of the loot was recovered. Bolton, alias Boles, alias Bart was brought to trial and convicted-of one robbery, the twenty-eighth. It is interesting that he was not accused of the other twenty-seven. Despite all the trouble and expense Black Bart had caused them, Wells Fargo was willing to settle for the one conviction... perhaps it was because of Bart's age, fifty-five. It brought up charges that Wells Fargo had made a "deal," which seems unlikely.

The highwayman, Black Bart, was sentenced in 1884 to six years in San Quentin Prison. He did not serve the six year term; he was released in January 1888, swearing never to break the law again. An interesting end note on the Black Bart affair occurred--according to the newspapers--when Bart-Bolton-Boles was released from confinement. Reporters crowded about him, several discussing with him the statement that he was going straight thereafter. One reporter then asked if Bart would write any more poetry. "Young man," Bart replied, "I have just said I would commit no more crimes!" For many years Black Bart had been a legendary figure, bold and successful--if not made much richer by his desperate acts. Other highwaymen copied him. A few said, from behind masks, that they were Black Bart, but none ever equalled the odd little man with the deep voice. He was a will-o-the-wisp, here one day and far off the next, plodding across the green hills in his derby hat, lugging his suitcase and his shotgun. After his release there were stories that he had gone back to his profession, but they were never proved. And there was no more poetry. James Hume and his coworkers investigated the suspected cases and to a man declared them not to have the real Black Bart's distinctire touch.

PEARL HART AND THE LAST STAGE by Edw. D. Wood, Jr. She was a little old lady, white-haired, wrinkled, and stooped... but with a spirit which seemed to belie her years. This is how the clerk of the Pima County Courthouse remembered her as she ambled into that building one hot afternoon in 1924 and asked him "Can I look the place over?" The clerk had no idea who she was. "Do you have some singular purpose for your request, madam?" "I once lived here. I wondered if it had changed any." He might never have known who the old lady was, except there was a register all visitors must sign... and after he had shown her around the building she said her name aloud, proudly. "Pearl Hart, that's my name!" Then she left the premises and was never heard of again. Where did Pearl Hart go? Some have said quite frankly, "in to oblivion." Who really seems to care? Well, history does. Pearl Hart has the distinction of being the last stagecoach robber in the United States. She robbed the Globe-Arizona stage line which was so active in those parts during the turn of the century. She was described as a young, slim "boy," as she held a six-shooter at the passengers of the coach. (The coach, by the way, was a Concord made in Concord, New Hampshire, rnainly for the Wells Fargo Company during the

1870-1887 period. There were only thirty made in all. The wheels were like spindly-legged cuts of dry oak. The sides were open, and the body was almost plywood in structure. Bullets could hit and race through from side to side with no difficulty at all.) Pearl Hart knew this. Drivers and their passengers inside the fragile shell were most reluctant to anger the armed outlaws outside. Indeed they wouldn't have had a fiddler's chance against a single road agent let alone two, one coming on either side of the road. Ahd on this historic occasion, the two consisted of a slim young "fellow" and an older, much heavier companion. The driver had only three passengers on that ride. A Chinaman with full queue, a drummer stereotyped as short and fat, and a dude with his hair parted in the middle. This was the cast of the last stage holdup in the West. The driver, upon seeing the guns leveled on him from the road ahead, told that he yanked in on the reins "... with a tug that set them on their haunches!" He was referring to his passengers and probably was chewing spitting tobacco and chuckling as he recalled the tangle of arms, legs and heads. But it didn't matter at the moment... they were numb from flying across the coach, back to front. However it was the drummer who first shook his head in disbelief as he came around and found himself staring into the big, round hole at the end of the barrel of the six-shooter held in the nervous hands of the younger highway "man." He could only blink in surprise at the situation. He certainly had heard of stage robberies, but that always happened to somebody else... never to him. But there it was, and there he was. "Get up and line up!" Although the hand shook nervously, the voice was determined--a bit high-pitched, but determined. The drummer knew from long experiences in other fields that a nervous one was the most dangerous of all. Therefore he and his two riding companions untangled themselves and did what they were told. They lined up along the side of the coach and one by one they were permitted to lower their hands to shell out their loot: the Chinaman, $5.00, the dude, $36.00, and the drummer, a hefty $390.00. Then, after searching them down the heavy man boomed like a bull moose. "Get back in the coach," he said, "and if one of you looks back..." He didn't need to say any more. The passengers made almost as much of a tangle of themselves getting back into the coach as they had at the abrupt, unscheduled stop. The driver cracked his whip over the horses' flanks and the only thing the road agents saw at that point was the east end of the coach heading west in a cloud of alkali dust. No one looked back. Moments later, when the sound of the coach trace chains and the driver's whip had faded into the distance, the two road agents laughed heartily. "Guess we did it Joe," the younger one said, and then "he" removed the wide-brimmed hat and permitted the long brunette hair to cascade down over the shoulders of the last stagecoach robber... Pearl Hart... an interesting young girl who was as effective in boys' clothes as in female wardrobe, and equally presentable.

Joe was Joe Boot who had at times tried his hand, unsuccessfully, as a miner. "You're a smart 'un, Pearl." There was tremendous admiration in his voice. After all, Pearl had set the whole scheme into motion and convinced Joe Boot to ride along with her. Neither of them knew the first thing about such daring episodes, but Pearl had read the exploits of such road agents as Black Bart, Rattlesnake Dick, Canada Bill, Tiburcio Vasquez, the Fartington Brothers, the James Gang and many others--not all of them known stage robbers, but then who was to say that they had not tried their hand at the game at one time or another. And she also read of such women as Calamity Jane, Hosenose Kate, Cattle Anne, Belle Starr and that Union spy during the Tennessee campaign, Pauline Cushman. Pearl wanted excitement and fame. She had always been a nervous little girl and during her growing years she was what might be called a wallflower. But as her late teens set in and her mind became actively involved with the fiction and fact she absorbed, she knew she had to find her place also in history. Neither Pearl nor Joe Boot could possibly know, at the time of that stage holdup, that they were making history in a big way. Nor could they know the quirk of fate which was only seventy-two hours in front of them. In their hurried ride away from the scene of the crime they ran into a blinding rain storm. They couldn't figure which end was up and they rode around in circles for the entire seventy-two hours. They were exhausted beyond human endurance, with the rain stinging their bodies. Joe Boot began losing much of the admiration he had had for his female companion who wanted to keep on riding. Even a strong man, sooner or later, has to lay his weary head down for strength-replenishing sleep. There was no shelter to be found-no barn, ranch, shed or lean-to. They slipped off their mounts and lay under the horses' bellies for whatever shelter the animals might provide. Actually this was not an uncommon procedure in the Old West. Many a rider stretched himself out under his horse for protection of one sort or another... the weather, pursuers, strangers in the night, bobcats or snakes. A loyal horse would always let his master know if potential danger lurked. That night a passing rancher, who at any other time probably would not have had any suspicions at seeing the sleeping couple, took note. In town, where he had spent a few hours at the local saloon, which was the news spreading media of the period, he had heard of the stagecoach robbery only a few miles up the trail. Pearl Hart and Joe Boot had not looked too carefully at the terrain in their escape and the storm had added to their confusion. And so thay had been riding around in a circle all those hours! Knowing the robbers were still on the loose, the rancher became suspicious and headed quickly back to town and to the sheriff... one William Truman. The horses might have warned Pearl and Joe, either on the first advance of the rancher or later on the approach of the sheriff and his posse... or they might not. The two were so completely knocked out from days in the saddle and exposure to the elements that they probably wouldn't have heard anything anyway. If the crashing thunder couldn't keep them awake, then

certainly the whinny of their horses would be only soft music in the night. They were awakened and captured without incident by the sheriff and his posse. And there the story might have ended with their arrest, trial and sentencing. But colorful outlaws of the Old West had a way of generating publicity. Pearl couldn't know it at the time, but her name was about to be linked with all her fact and fiction heros. At least for a time she would realize her fondest wishes. Word spread fast from village to the larger towns. The captive pair were taken to Florence where a tremendous crowd was waiting for the pretty little lady who had dared to don boys attire, strap on guns and had threatened to use them. And, according to historians, she might have used them under pressure through her nervousness. We might look to her being led through the streets of Florence that very hot Arizona day, hands tied to the saddle horn, her feet roped together under the belly of her horse. She would have still been in the boys clothes she wore during the robbery, bedraggled from those days in the saddle and the elements of the weather, frightened to death of the crowd which she faced. Crowds similar to those, during that period, usually meant a lynch mob. However this particular crowd was not a lynch crowd. Suddenly they began to cheer with an ear-pounding tempo. They shouted her name and gave her words of encouragement, and acclaimed her actions. Those in the crowd had found a new heroine for their eager attentions, for something new to add to their own drab lives. They loved action and those who could give it to them. Pearl straightened her slim, tiny frame in the saddle. The cameras were poised. The sheriff also wanted his picture taken with the prisoners for his own political reasons, therefore he permitted the cameramen and the newspeople aH the time they needed to get their film to the right exposure and for the reporters to ask their anxious questions. "Would you do it again, Pearl?" asked one of them. The crowd~ the attention... Pearl Hart suddenly felt Very strong. She was suddenly the bobcat, whereas all of her previous life she had been the pussycat, except at that moment of the stage robbery when she knew she had some kind of control. And too, her boarding school days had given her some kind of insight to human relations. She knew she had something made, but what it was... well, she'd still have to find out. She took the role of the bobcat in answering the reporters' questions. "Damn right, podner," she snarled. Pearl had suddenly dropped all of her student years, the proper English phrasing, and adopted the vernacular of the crude western character (advanced to us to this day through western films). Yuma Territorial Prison, where Pearl was sentenced to for a period of five years, actually had no facilities for a female prisoner. They simply didn't know what to do with this pretty little girl. Special uniforms even had to be made for her. They couldn't have her running around in the attire of the other prisoners. It just wouldn't seem right. And so, for a time she had free movements within the conf'mes of the walls of the prison themselves. And since she had become we!l-known--and in a way, famous--as a woman stagecoach robber she was the curiosity of all

visitors. (But even to that moment no one could possibly have known just how important to history she would be, that she had committed the last venture of its kind. There was something about the fact that a woman had done such a thing so late in the history of the stage lines that led to some morbid curiosity about her.) Pearl was Sought by all visitors to the prison and she was only too happy to accommodate them, and give them her enlarged side of the story. She had achieved even greater importance than she had that day in her ride down the streets of Florence in the questions the visitors and the reporters and the cameramen asked of her behind the walls. And Pearl evoked with her new, crude language, a colorful character that could rival any and all of her predecessors. She was really in her glory when posing for the cameras, and for the historian it is too bad that most of those old prints have long ceased to exist. Although Joe Boot slipped quickly into obscurity shortly after Sheriff Truman brought the outlaw pair into Florence, the pistol and rifle-toting Pearl was just beginning to live, to be recognized, and to find her place in history. And what she didn't conjure up in her own mind was created by the newspaper accounts of her daring adventure into the badman's territory. Altogether, these made her break out in the cold sweats of fame. Time would be good in telling her just how famous she had become. But even with that fame she too would slip into obscurity. But for the meantime Pearl's fame was not to end with her release from prison. All the stories printed about her in the papers and periodicals stirred the public's imagination and they wanted to see her. It was inevitable that a stage producer would contact this character who had generated so much interest. She was a good property... a great investment, and, then as now, whatever the people wanted to see was quickly supplied by anyone who saw the commercial possibilities. Pearl was such a demand... this petite, dainty little girl who masqueraded as a man, who could handle so many weapons, who could brazenly stop and hold up a stagecoach and rob its passengers. Pearl, in her outlaw clothes, guns blazing, traveled around the country and appeared on stage for a year as the "Arizona Bandit." In the best western style she swaggered, cursed and produced all the villainous sounds as she enlarged upon her exploits. She had a year of ecstatic glory with the cheers of the public ringing in her ears. And then night after night the audience became thinner and thinner. The fickle public soon tires of even its most important heros. It was then that she disappeared from the scene as quickly as she had arrived upon it... until that 1924 visit to the Pima County courthouse. And then, complete oblivion... for the woman who had pulled the last stagecoach robbery. WILD BILL HICKOK : OUTLAW FIGHTER by Allan Morgan

Of all the lawmen of the early West, none was better known or more feared than James Butler Hickok, known as Wild Bill. Yet he was not a lawman in the sense that Bill Tilghman was, for instance. Hickok was not trained for

it, nor did he particularly seek a sheriffs or marshal's job. Like fame, the jobs overtook him. He was an out-of-work Army scout when the first one came along. He is most remembered for his short stint as town marshal of Abilene during that cow town's heyday. He had been a lawman first in Hays City, a lay-over spot on the Santa Fe Trail, but Abilene, Kansas, made him nationally famous. In many of the pieces written about him and in the movies depicting his life and times, this part of Wild Bill's life is emphasized. In these he is called a fast-draw, dead-shot gunman. Only part of this is true. Wild Bill lived just slightly before the classic western gunslinger period. His favorite weapon was the Navy Colt--probably the favorite handgun of troops of both sides in the Civil War. Wild Bill is shown in photographs carrying two of them. The Navy was a fine pistol; an 1851 model Colt, cap and ball, usually with a 7 inch barrel. But it was not a fast-draw gun--not in comparison with the model 1873 Colt Peacemaker. The shorter barreled Peacemaker was a cartridge gun and the classic western gunslinger's weapon. This gun was barely available to civilians at the time of Hickok's death. He was born in LaSalle County, Illinois, May 27, 1837. A farm boy, Hickok grew up in a rugged land under hardship conditions. In his early years he did many things: he ranched; served as a constable; did duty for a time as a bodyguard to a general during the Kansas Free-State War; was a buffalo hunter; and a drifter. About 1859 he was a wagon driver on the Santa Fe Trail. This trail was one of the three great ways West from the Mississippi River which was on the edge of civilization in America. The first was the Oregon trail; the second was the Missouri River, the route of Lewis and Clark; and the third was the Santa Fe Trail which went from the Missouri River cutting south of Topeka, Kansas, to Fort Dodge and then dividing. The north fork went through Bent's Fort and thence to the old Mexican town of Santa Fe. The southern fork cut through the Oklahoma panhandle. Years later the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad largely followed the same route. In his early years Hickok was no more than a laborer, a big, good-looking youth. He drove stages, helped repair way-stations--and worked at every job in these stations as all stage company employees did. In the spring of 1861, the year the Civil War started, Hickok was in Nebraska at the Rock Creek Station of Russell, Majors and Waddell... of Pony Express fame. At this place started the Hickok saga-myth-folk tale. Let it be said that the real, living and breathing James B. Hickok needs no tall tales to embellish his actual deeds. As a matter of fact too many of his true accomplishments are now clouded by the myths told of him. He was an unusual man. He did perform incredible feats--but probably not at Rock Creek Station. The truth can no longer be discovered; Hickok did become involved in a fight with a man, David McCanles, and several others. Several were killed, including McCanles. Hickok and two other men were arrested and charged with murder but were never brought to trial. McCanles is sometimes shown as the leader of a ferocious gang of killers, and Hickok is said to have slain dozens in bloody hand-to-hand combat at Rock Creek. Neither story holds up. Hickok went into the Union Army then, first as a mule-skinner, later as a scout. The various units to which he was attached operated in Missouri, Arkansas and the Indian Territory. He is credited with fantastic deeds of

derring-do, operating against the Confederates. He carried dispatches, scouted enemy units to determine size and intent, and was chased and shot at innumerable times. The record shows that he served bravely and well because he was constantly in demand. He liked this life, was a restless man at best, and became expert at tracking, scouting and getting out with a whole skin. After the war, in Springfield, Missouri, came the first of the pistol confrontations which helped make his reputation. He fought a man named Dave Tutt. Hickok and Tutt knew each other and were not enemies--until Susanna Moore came along. Hickok had known Susanna became very cool. Hichok's pride, never a small thing,. was suffering. This fight was not a quick-draw contest. The two men met in a public square. Tutt drew a pistol and fired first at Hickok, who already had his Navy in his hand. (Some say a Colt Dragoon, which is a larger, heavier model.) Hickok aimed carefully, taking his time, and shot Tutt through the heart. This was clearly self defense, and no action was taken. Somewhere along the way Hickok had collected the nickname, Wild Bill. Some say it was because of his war deeds. Others attributed it to a spur-of-the-moment yell, "Go get 'em, Wild Bill!" by a spectator who watched him clear a saloon of toughs. At any rate, when in 1866 he became a deputy marshal in Fort Riley, Kansas, he was popularly known as Wild Bill. He liked the name. He was beginning to build his reputation as a dead shot and as a dangerous man to cross. He undoubtedly did everything he could to help that idea along, because it made his job as lawman easier. To walk into a seething deadfall (saloon), or to face a gang of heavily armed horse thieves as a nobody was less promising of success than to walk in as Wild Bill Hickok, a man who could deal death with either hand. Such a reputation made any opponent nervous and more likely to make a mistake. There was only one problem with owning a big reputation. Eventually someone would try to usurp it--by killing the man who had it. It sometimes sounds like dime novel stuff, but it was true that a man acquired a reputation as a gunman and that others envied him and challenged him because of it. This is the very thing that finally caused Hickok's death. This raw western country was not the civilized East. It attracted desperate men, many wanted elsewhere. Malcontents came, and others who were unable to buck the competition in other places. It appealed to those out for excitement and adventure and it contained traveling salesmen, known as drummers--some of whom were very odd types. There were no tourists as we know the term today. Emigrants with families usually camped out-of-town, away from the roaring dance halls. Some men gained reputations without wanting them, and few men with reputations lived through the era. To keep from dying, the gunman developed a sixth sense, a cat-like watchfulness at all times. He had to be ready to shoot anywhere and everywhere. Such a man was pointed out wherever he went. People got off trains to come and look at him, and he was a celebrity as great as any movie star today. Hickok enjoyed his fame. Two years after the war Hickok was again an army scout working out of Fort Riley. He was also a courier, carrying messages through Indian country, risking his life daily. The records speak for themselves. He was a very valuable man, the most dependable and valuable scout in the army, some said.

The Indian wars lasted about forty years, from the time of the Civil War to 1898. The last battle with soldiers was a small fight at Leech Lake, Minnesota, with the Chippewa. Indian uprisings were sporadic; they were often small but deadly thrusts by wild-riding Redmen. The Indians, unfortunately for their cause, were for the most part very undisciplined fighters. Tribesmen followed war leaders, as long as they believed in them, but left the leaders abruptly when they did not. Sometimes this occurred in the middle of a battle. Indians had no knowledge of tactics, for the most part. As individuals they were superb; as tactical groups they were dismal failures. (Custer happened to meet one of the most overwhelming hosts of Indians ever assembled in one place on the north American continent.) Wild Bill's service against the plains Indians spawned many fantastic and unbelievable stories. The flood of "yaller-backed novel" stories sprang from this period of his life. As a scout, Hickok lived on the frontier. Now he let it pass him by. He had gained a tremendous reputation; maybe he wanted to see other aspects of the land, no one knows. But in 1869 he was in Hays--or Hays City--Kansas. A man of Wild Bill's standing could not stoop to manual labor to support himself. He could not clerk in a store. He turned to gambling. (A great many gunfighters of the West were gamblers.) Hays was a rough-tough town, an emigrant's way-station. It harbored general stores for the necessities, and a great many saloons, bawdy houses and gambling dens for the relief of tensions. It took a tough, no-nonsense man to keep such a town in line. Wild Bill was one of those who could do it, so he was elected sheriff of the county and entered a new phase of his career. In Hays he laid down a set of laws and enforced them. In doing so he made an enemy of a man named Strawhan, or Strawhorne, who attempted to kill Hickok. Hickok entered a room and Strawhan pulled a gun when he thought Hickok was not looking. But Hickok was always looking. (Old timers who knew him say that the one thing they recall vividly about Hickok was that he was "cat-eyed.") In the case of Strawhan, Wild Bill drew his pistol and killed the man when he saw Strawhan aim. This event gave rise to stories of his "lightning draw." It is more likely that Hickok, noting the motion, drew his Navy and fired. This was the gunfighter's "edge." He was always willing and ready to shoot to kill. Wild Bill never bluffed. He never hesitated. (A few years later he was to kill a friend because of this trait.) Wild Bill Hickok was in Abilene as a gambler when he was tagged by Mayor Joseph McCoy as marshal. At this time Bill was in his prime, taller than most and handsome--as his photographs show. The reputation that preceded him into Abilene was immense. Everyone knew of his deeds against the Indians, and of his numerous combats in Hays and other towns. He was famous and men gave him a wide berth. One old-time Texas cowboy, recalling the day he came into Abilene fresh from a cattle drive and had his first look at the renowned marshal, said of Wild Bill: "He came out of Ben Thompson's Bull's Head Saloon. He wore a low-crowned, wide, black hat and a frock coat. His hair was yellow and it hung down to his shoulders. When I came along the street he was standing there with his back to the wall and his thumbs hooked in his red sash. He stood there and rolled his head from side to side looking at everything and

everybody from under his eyebrows--just like a mad old bull. I decided then and there that I didn't want any part of him!" Hickok stayed in Abilene during its most hectic period, eight months in all. But his reign was characterized by protests and charges from both sides, the townv people and the Texans, that Hickok did not really maintain law and order; that he seldom interfered in brawls; that his own gun ordinances were not enforced; that he allowed drunkenness on the streets; that he sided with the madams and the gamblers--and so on. He spent most of his time in the Alamo Saloon, gambling. He was dissatisfied with his salary, less than Tom Smith had received, and with his deputies. So he made himself available when he felt like it. Susanna Moore was there, living with him--she bore him no ill because of Dave Tutt, apparently. He also saw much of Agnes Lake, whom he later married. When Mayor McCoy insisted, Bill did run certain elements out of town and he closed some of the wilder dance halls and variety shows. The famous Texas gunman, Ben Thompson, was in Abilene. There was bad blood between him and Hickok, but the two never cared to face each other to shoot it out. The quickest killer of them all, Wes Hardin, also met Hickok but not in combat. There is a story that Frank and Jesse James, along with Cole Younger, were all in Abilene and met with Hickok also. Note that these professional gunfighters seldom faced each other with hostile intent. They frequently growled at each other from a distance, as Thompson and Hickok did, but they knew it was certain death for one or both should they start shooting. The so-called "showdown" so dear to the movies was very rare. (The battle at the OK Corral, years later, was the outstanding example.) The famous event, the shooting of gambler Phil Coe by Hickok, was the beginning of the riotous era's end. Coe, a friend of Ben Thompson, was a big, flamboyant man who seldom carried a gun. It is said that he and Hickok fell out over a woman. The accounts vary but it seems that Coe was armed in this instance and fired a shot in the street. Hickok appeared and attempted to quiet the disturbance--Coe and others were celebrating, it seems, and when Coe raised his pistol, Hickok fired with the usual results. Hickok's detractors say it was deliberate because he disliked Coe. A special policeman, Mike Williams, who was a good friend of Wild Bill's, came running up from behind. Hickok, hearing only the running footsteps, whirled and fired, killing Williams instantly. Not long after this, Hickok was discharged by the town council. He joined a show troupe, one of the typical wild west melodramas of the time. It featared him as a great scout and frontiersman. The show toured the eastern cities rescuing maidens from the savage Indiam and massacring Redmen by the hundreds. But Hickok was not happy in this life. He was not much of an actor; he had always enjoyed the limelight, but this was not his thing. He quit the show and returned to the West and became a gambler again. He visited booming Wichita, another of the cattle towns, and tough Caidwell, the "border queen." For a time he drifted. In Cheyenne, early in 1876, he married Agnes Lake. The black hills of the Dakotas were opening up to miners. Gold had been discovered. Wild Bill, in company with his old friend, Colorado Charley

Utter, guided a company of miners into the wilds. In Deadwood, he and Utter located mining claims and began to work them. There was talk that he would be hired to clean up the town. Deadwood was a different kind of town from the railheads and cattle towns of Kansas... a little less savory. It was filled with get-rich-quick scramblers; tin-horn gamblers; madams and girls; ex-buffalo hunters; mule skinners; soldiers and freighters--not to mention all the bums and no-goods. One of these was a broken-nosed man named Jack McCall. It was Wednesday, August 2, 1876, the Same year that his friend Lt. Col. Custer met his end, that Wild Bill sat in on a poker game in Lewis and Mann's Saloon. Habitually Hickok sat with his back to the wall. This was probably the one time in his life that he varied from that rule. It seems the more curious since he had many enemies in Deadwood who did not want to see him made town marshal. Some of these enemies had primed Jack McCall, impressing on the bum that he would acquire Wild Bill's fantastic reputation if he would only kill the gunman. When McCall walked into the saloon and saw Hickok's back exposed, he could not resist, he put a gun to Hickok's head and pulled the trigger. Wild Bill died instantly, as McCall ran out of the saloon. McCall was tried for the crime and acquitted. The following year he was again tried and this time hanged for murder. Wild Bill was buried at Deadwood, and with his passing one of the chapters of the West was closed. His thirty-eight years spanned two distinct periods of the West, and he was famous in both. Much has been made of Hickok's prowess with rifle and pistol. Yet he was not a gunman in the sense that Doc Holliday was, or Bat Masterson or even William Bonney, alias Billy the Kid. He was a master of his weapons, there is no doubt of that. But unlike many of the others he had something else too. He had a presence; men who knew him spoke of his steady, hypnotizing stare. According to witnesses, he often cowed a roomful of tough men by his personality alone. Note that he lived through some of the most turbulent times, presented himself daily as a target for any aspiring outlaw, and survived. He was feared by even the most hardened, who did not trifle with him. He was a killer. He lived in a different time, and by very different rules. But with all his dexterity and coolness, his strength was not in his weapons but in himself.

CONTRIBUTORS Clayton Matthews is the author of over one hundred books of mystery and suspense. In addition to short stories for Zane Grey Magazine he has written the western novel Bounty Hunt At Ballarat. Gary Brandner has a degree in Journalism from the University of Washington, has written mystery fiction and a novelette and short story for Zane Grey Magazine.

Arthur Moore was born and educated in California and took a particular interest in the lore of the West. In addition to short stories for Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine he has written the western historical novels Storm Trail, Look Down, Look Down and Trackdown. Chet Cunningham has worked with business motion pictures and has written columns in trade journals. He is now a full-time free-lance writer and has finished several western novels. Allan Morgan was raised in Honolulu and has worked as a newspaperman and a motion picture animator. He has written short stories for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and for Zane Grey Magazine. Daniel T. Streib has a Master's degree in Journalism from the University of Iowa and in addition to spy, detective and science fiction stories has written for the screen. Steve Ross is a graduate of UCLA, an editor and a widely published free-lance writer with a deep interest in the American southwest. Edw. D. Wood, Jr. has worked in the areas of western fact and fiction for many years. The author of numerous books and articles he has also written, produced and directed western feature films.