The woman was just about as dangerous as Horn himself. I think she was about one-half Spanish or something, not entirely all-American.
Then, about the first of the year, 1902, six months after Willie Nickell died, LeFors got a letter from W. D. Smith of Miles City, his old Chief Inspector from his range detective days. Smith was looking for a “good man to do some secret work,” involving rustling on the Big Moon River. The letter gave LeFors the beginnings of ah idea. He forwarded it to John Coble’s Iron Mountain Ranch, where Horn had returned, offering him the job.
Horn was enthusiastic. Addressing LeFors as “Friend Joe,” Horn wrote back that he “would like to take up that work.” He continued: “I don’t care how big or bad his [W. D. Smith’s] men are or how many of them there are, I can handle them ... Put me in communication with Mr. Smith whom I know well by reputation and I can guarantee him the recommendation of every cow man in the state of Wyoming in this line of work ... I can handle his work ... with less expense in the shape of lawyer and witness fees than any man in the business.” Horn added, “Joe you yourself know what my reputation is although we have never been out together.”
It was the response—and the opportunity—LeFors had been hoping for. On Sunday, January 12, he met Horn at the Cheyenne railroad station, and from there the two cordial acquaintances went to LeFors’s office for a final interview by LeFors on behalf of W. D. Smith. Parts of their conversation went this way:
Horn—“I don’t want to be making reports to anybody at any time. If a man has to make reports all the time, they will catch the wisest S.O.B. on earth. These people are not afraid of shooting, are they?”
LeFors—“No, they are not afraid of shooting.”
Horn—“I shoot too much I know. You know me when it comes to shooting.”
Horn—“The only thing I was ever afraid of was that I would be compelled to kill an officer, or a man I didn’t want to; but I would do everything to keep from being seen, but if he kept after me, I would certainly kill him.”
Horn told LeFors that he had laid in wait for Willie Nickell for at least three days, with nothing to eat except a little raw bacon. “I get so hungry that I could kill my mother for some grub,” Horn said, “but I never quit a job until I get my man.”
LeFors—“How far was Willie Nickell killed?”
Horn—“About three hundred yards. It was the best shot that I ever made, and the dirtiest trick I ever done.”
The two men went downstairs for a drink. They returned in fifteen minutes to finish the interview.
Horn—“The first man I killed was when I was only twenty-six years old [presumably Horn was not counting Indians]. He was a coarse S.O.B.”
LeFors—“How much did you get for killing these fellows? In the Powell and Lewis case you got six hundred dollars apiece. You killed Lewis in the corral with a six-shooter. I would like to have seen the expression on his face when you shot him.” (William Lewis and Fred Powell were Iron Mountain ranchers whose 1895 slayings remained officially unsolved.)
Horn—“He was the scaredest S.O.B. you ever saw. How did you come to know that, Joe?”
LeFors—“I have known everything you have done, Tom, for a great many years. I know where you were paid this money on the train between Cheyenne and Denver. Why did you put the rock under the kid’s head after you killed him? This is one of your marks, isn’t it?”
Horn—“Yes, that is the way I hang out my sign to collect money for a job of this kind.”
LeFors—“Have you got your money yet for the killing of Nickell?”
Horn—“I got that before I did the job.”
LeFors—“You got five hundred dollars for that. Why did you cut the price?”
Horn—“I got twenty-one hundred dollars.”
LeFors—“How much is that a man?”
Horn—“That is for three dead men, and one man shot at five times. Killing is my specialty. I look at it as a business proposition, and I think I have a corner on the market.”
A connecting door behind LeFors’s desk led to a storeroom, and in preparation LeFors had removed the door, planed off the bottom two inches, and rehung it. Behind the gimmicked door, Deputy Sheriff Leslie Snow and district court stenographer Charles Omhaus were eavesdropping. As soon as LeFors and Horn went downstairs for another drink, Omhaus, who had taken down the entire interview in shorthand, hurried out to have his notes typed up. A warrant was issued the next morning, and Horn was arrested by the sheriff, a deputy, and Sandy McKneal in the lobby of the Inter-Ocean Hotel, while Joe LeFors looked on.
The trial of Tom Horn for the murder of Willie Nickell was held in the fall of 1902, before a jury of eight ranchers, a cowhand, a butcher, a blacksmith, and a hotel bellhop.
The head of Horn’s defense team, engaged on his behalf by Horn’s cattle-baron employers, was John W. Lacy, general counsel for the Union Pacific Railroad and former state Supreme Court chief justice. The wealthy stockgrowers were anxious to help Horn in every possible way, because he had the power to implicate some of them as accessories to several—and perhaps dozens—of murders.
Parts of the prosecution’s argument were trivial: Horn’s admission that he had been riding in the vicinity of the Nickell ranch the day before Willie was shot; the introduction of the record of a court hearing from eleven years earlier, in which Kels Nickell was accused but never formally charged with attacking John Coble, Horn’s friend and employer, with a pocket knife. The weight of the state’s case rested solely upon the damning, if possibly tainted, confession. Omhaus’s transcript was admitted as evidence, and Joe LeFors attested to its accuracy and the circumstances under which it had been obtained. Both men, and witness Leslie Snow, declared that Horn had been sober throughout the conversation.
Attorney Lacy offered parallel defenses. First, Horn claimed he was intoxicated and bragging during the LeFors interview, and introduced character witnesses to testify that he was a surly, loud-mouthed, blustering drunk. In the alternative, Horn insisted that he had been speaking hypothetically, and only to impress a future employer with his familiarity with the accepted methods of combatting rustlers. According to Horn, portions of the transcript that would support this contention were edited out.
On October 23 Tom Horn was adjudged guilty and condemned to death; on appeal the state Supreme Court sustained the conviction and sentence. But with the verdict, the suspense over the Tom Horn case only tautened. Would Tom Horn “peach” on his employers to save his skin? Would those who sided with him—or those who feared what he knew—try to break him out, or even assassinate him?
The answer to the first question was no. As one Wyoming cattleman said after Horn was finally hanged, “He died without ‘squealing’, to the great relief of many very respectable citizens of the West.” But during the year between trial and execution, the atmosphere in Cheyenne was a combination of siege and circus.
Before Thanksgiving 1902, it was widely broadcast that Butch Cassidy and the dreaded Wild Bunch were gathering to ride to Tom Horn’s liberation. The fact that Butch and Sundance were in Bolivia and that at least half a dozen of the old gang were doing time or dead did little to ruin this tall tale’s barroom currency. Meanwhile, Horn occupied his spare moments with escape attempts. He wrote to other prisoners in match-soot on scraps of blanket and shirttail, plotting elaborate liberation schemes. At various times he tried to fashion keys from broom-wire, soup bones, a piece of wood, and shards of glass. On one occasion, Under Sheriff Richard Proctor took a case knife from the prisoner; on another, he found a length of lead pipe hidden in Horn’s pant leg.
Then, on August 9, Horn and Jim McCloud, who was charged with armed robbery and who was the only other prisoner on the jail’s top floor, managed to overpower Proctor. Although Proctor had the keys in his pocket, he insisted the ring was locked in the safe. The prisoners marched Proctor to the strongbox, but instead of the key he removed a revolver which he fired four times, wounding McCloud slightly.
Horn and McC
loud raced downstairs, but by now Proctor was ringing the fire bell to give the alarm, and a crowd was converging on the jailhouse. McCloud jumped on the sheriff’s horse and rode west, but was captured immediately.
Horn ran on foot in the other direction. Hatless and carrying Proctor’s sneak-gun, Horn attracted the attention of a shopkeeper named Eldrich, who pulled his own gun from under the counter, stepped outside and shot Horn in the neck, not seriously. When Horn tried to return fire, he discovered he could not work the modem automatic lock safety of Proctor’s pistol. Merchant Eldrich disarmed the desperado, and officers arrived in time to keep the mob from beating Horn to death. As a last adventure, it was an ignominious coda to a notorious career.
In the last days before Horn’s execution, the Wyoming capital seemed moonstruck. It was persistently rumored that gangs of cowboys were massing outside town, prepared to sack the town, if necessary, to free Tom Horn. Governor Fenimore Chatterton, himself the object of death threats, called out the state militia, and machine gun nests covered the jail. At least twenty-five sheriff’s deputies from all over the state stood rifle guard in nearby buildings and at every window of the courthouse. Sheriff Edward Smalley, a grocer appointed to fill an unexpired term a few weeks before Horn’s arrest, nervously warned citizens to approach the jail at their own risk, while every arriving train brought more carloads of morbid curiosity seekers.
On the street in front of the jail, Kels Nickell, father of the victim, patrolled with a shotgun, buttonholing passersby like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner to declare his determination to turn Horn into dog meat should the killer attempt another jailbreak. Inside on the cell-block, a deathwatch detail stared glumly as Horn completed a horsehair riata he’d been hand-weaving for months. As he worked he could hear the crash and thud from the jailhouse courtyard as two hundred-pound sandbags were dropped through the trap over and over again to test the gallows.
The execution, on November 20, 1903, the day before Horn’s forty-third birthday, was anticlimactic, as it must be. On the way across the courtyard, Horn paused to shake the hands of two old rodeo pards, Charlie and Frank Irwin. Charlie asked if Horn had confessed, and Horn answered no. While Horn stood on the scaffolding, the Irwin boys sang the old railroad hymn, “Keep Your Hand upon the Throttle and Your Eye upon the Rail,” which, according to an account in the Chicago Record-Herald, brought “tears to the eyes of all except Horn himself.” Horn’s last words, to County Clerk Joseph Cahill as he adjusted Horn’s restraining straps, were, “Ain’t losing your nerve are you, Joe?” The trap was sprung at 11:08 in the morning, and sixteen minutes later Horn was pronounced dead of a broken neck. The handpicked witnesses congratulated Under Sheriff Proctor on a flawless execution.
In parts of Wyoming today, smart-mouthing about the Tom Horn case remains a fine way to incite barroom violence. A colleague of ours who grew up in the Iron Mountain country, and whose grandfather occasionally hosted Tom Horn when he rode their part of the range, reports that sentiment in that precinct remains nearly unanimously in Horn’s favor. Beyond doubt, the confession upon which his conviction depended would be summarily ruled inadmissible in a modem courtroom. In 1977, when In Wyoming magazine published a biographical sketch of Kels Nickell by a nephew, Dennie Trimble Nickell, even this admittedly biased writer does not flatly state that Tom Horn murdered his cousin.
Joe LeFors’s role in Tom Horn’s downfall did not appreciably affect his life or career. He remained with the U.S. Marshal’s office until April of 1908, when he went to work for the Wyoming Wool Growers Association. He was based in Wyoming for another dozen years after that, although he makes vague and tantalizing reference in his autobiography to other adventures during this period, including a “hazardous and thrilling” trip up an unnamed river in Central America; the shipwreck of a native schooner in the Caribbean, “the closest call I ever had;” and travel in Mexico and Argentina “as an officer and also as a private citizen.” He moved to southern California in 1921, but returned to Wyoming after a couple of seasons. He was seventy-five when he died on October 1, 1940, in Buffalo, the town where he had settled at the end of the cattle drive that had first brought him to Wyoming fifty-five years earlier.
Joe LeFors was a cop, private or public, for over thirty years, during a period when law was scarcer and gunplay more common than today. He appears to have done a good job. But LeFors lacked the flair for publicity of a Wyatt Earp, the glib good fellowship of a Bat Masterson, or the tragic flaws of a Wild Bill Hickok. The facts of his most noteworthy moment will always be overshadowed by the legend of his adversary, and Joe LeFors will remain a footnote to the last chapter of Western history.
On the day he died, Tom Horn gave John Coble a penciled manuscript, which Coble published the next year as Life of Tom Horn by Himself It is a vividly written description of Horn’s days as an Indian fighter and Pinkerton, but it ends with Horn’s arrival in Wyoming in 1894. I, Tom Horn, a superb novel by Will Henry, takes as its conceit the discovery in 1973 of a second Horn autobiography in which Horn tells the rest of the story and stoutly denies his guilt in the Nickell killing. In Henry’s version, the transcript of the confession was edited by LeFors to delete Horn’s denial of his guilt.
In his biography, The Saga of Tom Horn, Dean Krakel also argues that Horn was innocent of the Nickell killing, although Krakel acknowledges that Horn was a hired killer for cattle interests. Another excellent Horn biography is The Last of the Badmen, by Jay Monaghan. A detailed treatment of Horn’s career as a hired gun appears in The Gunfighters volume of the Time/Life series, The Old West. For reproductions of several contemporary newspaper accounts of the Tom Horn affair, as well as photographs of the principals, see The Authentic Wild West: The Gunfighters, by James D. Horan.
Joe LeFors wrote his autobiography, Wyoming Peace Officer, shortly before his death, but it was not published until 1953. LeFors was also the prototype of the title character of Whispering Smith, a best-selling novel by Frank H. Spearman (1859-1937) that was filmed in silent and sound versions; in the latter (1948, directed by Leslie Fenton), Alan Ladd plays Spearman’s soft-spoken special agent. In the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969, George Roy Hill), Joe LeFors is the leader of the posse that bursts out of an Overland Flyer boxcar and gives chase after the gang stops the Union Pacific train for the second time. Then there is Tom Horn (1980, William Wiard), starring Steve McQueen in his penultimate film before his death. The rest of the casting is equally good, the photography gorgeous, but the script and direction turns the story of the last gunfighter into ninety-eight minutes of tedium; the film was almost withheld from release altogether.
William Kittredge
Steven M. Krauzer
Missoula, Montana
Summer 1984
About the Authors
Owen Rountree was the pseudonym of two writers, Steven Mark Krauzer (1948-2009), and William Kittredge (1932 - ).
Krauzer was a prolific writer from Missoula, Montana. His aliases included ‘Jokemeisters’, Johnny Dee and the house-name Terry Nelsen Bonner, whose pseudonym appeared on the ‘Making of Australia’ series. He wrote several early Mack Bolan ‘Executioner’ novels, including Double Crossfire and Terrorist Summit, the Blaze series as J. W. Baron and the Dennison’s War series under the name ‘Adam Lassiter’. He also wrote two motion pictures, Cocaine Wars in 1985, and Sweet Revenge two years later.
William Kittredge is an American writer from Oregon. He grew up in Southeastern Oregon's Warner Valley in Lake County, where he attended school in Adel, Oregon, and later, high school in California and Oregon. He has received numerous awards including a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, and Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. With Annick Smith, he edited The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology. A prolific anthologist, Kittredge has also written a great deal of nonfiction.
Read more about Krauzer and Kittredge here and here!
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