Not long afterward, however, a posse caught up with Ed Cullen, Leonard Alverson, and Dave, and all three went to prison in Santa Fe. But they were shortly released, only to strike the Southern Pacific at a water stop on May 14, 1898. The following July, the gang struck again, hitting a train near Midland, Texas. During the next year, seven more train robberies took place, not all of them successful. By early 1900, Dave had been caught and tossed into the Tempe, Arizona, jail, where a Texas Ranger recognized him. The ranger notified the Butte, Montana, authorities that one of their robbers was doing time in Arizona. Atkins therefore went to Montana, but he spent only a brief time in jail before he was extradited back to Texas to be tried for the death of Tom Hardin.
Surprisingly, when the trial was delayed in getting under way, the authorities placed Atkins under house arrest in Knickerbocker. That could not hold him long either; Dave left home in May 1901 and sailed to Great Britain, where he volunteered for the war against the South African Boers. So he spent 84 days
at sea, to be followed by numerous battles against the Boers. The war ended in May 1902, and Atkins found himself back in Texas by that December. Two years later he sailed for British Honduras, but the only thing he got there was yellow fever.
Back in Texas by 1905, he became a cotton farmer, married, and then ran out of luck in 1911, when Texas gave him a five-year prison term for killing Tom Hardin. In 1932, he was charged with assault and wound up as a mental patient in the Wichita Falls State Hospital. He spent 32 years in the hospital, dying there at the age of 93 on June 12, 1964.
SEE KETCHUM, SAMUEL W.; KETCHUM, TOM
BACA, Abram (?-1881)
Abram Baca was born and grew up in and around Socorro, New Mexico, but little was known about him until a Christmas Eve service at the local Methodist Church in 1880, when he and his brother, Enofrio, plus a cousin, Antonio, placed muddy boots on the shawl of a young lady sitting in front of them. A commotion quickly started, and parishioners, led by A. M. Conklin, editor of the Scicoptt escorted the boys from the building. An hour or so later, however, when everyone left the church, the Bacas were waiting. They pinned Conklin to the church wall and shot him to death.
The boys scattered, but on December 29 an Anglo posse captured Antonio and placed him in the Socorro jail. Within a couple days, however, someone slipped a revolver through the jail bars to Antonio, who promptly shot and wounded jailer Jack Ketchum. The deputy drew his own weapon and killed him.
Abram and Enofrio were subsequently identified sitting on the porch of a local county judge at Ysleta, near El Paso, Texas. The rangers arrested Abram and returned him to Socorro.
Meanwhile, Enofrio fled across the Rio Grande to Zaragoza, Chihuahua, Mexico, where he was captured by Texas Ranger James Gillett, transported to Socorro, New Mexico, and lynched. Abram was tried for murder and acquitted.
S66 GILLETT, JAMES BUCHANAN
BACA, Elfego (1865-1945)
Elfego Baca was born in Socorro, New Mexico, but he spent his first 15 years in Topeka, Kansas. He spoke English with hardly an accent but occasionally had problems with his Spanish. In February 1881, he broke his father out of the Los Lunas, New Mexico, jail.
By January 1883, Baca seems to have shifted to the law enforcement side. Elfego shot at a group of cowboys who had been firing indiscriminately while riding through Escondito, New Mexico. In doing so Baca killed a cowhand named Townsend.
During October 1884, Baca became a sheriff's deputy in Socorro County and was assigned to a tiny (271 population) community called San Francisco Plaza, located on the upper San Francisco River. Tensions here had existed for some time between Anglo stock raisers (cowboys) and local Hispanic sheep raisers.
On October 28, Deputy Baca arrested Charles McCarthy, a cowboy working for the nearby Slaughter Ranch, on charges of disturbing the peace. That night 12 cowhands demanded McCarthy's release. Shooting started, and Baca killed a cowpoke named Young Parham. On the following day, 40 to 50 cowboys (Baca later claimed 80), all angry, approached the plaza and demanded that Baca surrender himself. Baca took refuge in a tiny picket cabin belonging to Geronimo Armijo. In the meantime, justice of the Peace William Wilson, a cattleman, deputized several men as constables; cowboy William B. Hearne was one of them. Hearne approached the cabin, demanded entrance, received no response, kicked the door, and was shot in the stomach by Baca, the bullet passing through the door. Hearne died shortly afterward.
The standoff between the cowboys and Baca lasted slightly more than 24 hours. While the events were dramatic, later writers, although ably assisted by Baca's florid personal accounts, habitually stretched the intensity and the reality too far. There were no hundreds of cowboys present, there were no thousands of rounds fired, there was no cooking of meals by Baca while trapped inside. Instead, Baca surrendered to Deputy Frank Rose. Baca went briefly to jail in the Socorro County Courthouse.
In the spring of 1885, a grand jury indicted Baca for murder, but he was acquitted. A second grand jury indicted him, and again he was acquitted. He also campaigned for and was elected to the position of Socorro County clerk. Later he became a school superintendent. He served in the Republican Party and considered himself an attorney-at-law. He even opened a detective agency. Baca continued to carry a deputy sheriff's badge and sometimes took to the field. But most of all he loved to talk, and talking often became his stock in trade. Never one to be selfeffacing, Baca even suggested he had the inside track on the White Sands, New Mexico, unsolved murders of Col. Albert Jennings Fountain and his eight-yearold son, Henry. But after he discussed his "information" with Pinkerton detectives assigned to the case, one of them dismissed Baca as "a frontier confidence man."
As an attorney, Baca achieved considerable renown, although he never successfully defended 19 men charged with murder, as he claimed. Still, he was good enough by March 1905 for Governor Miguel Otero to appoint him as the district attorney for Socorro and Sierra Counties. Baca became a prominent politician, sometimes supporting and sometimes denouncing the Mexican Revolution. In El Paso, Texas, on January 31, 1915, Baca shot and killed Celestino Otero, a Mexican revolutionary sitting in a car.
In 1918, Baca became sheriff of Socorro County, New Mexico, and served one controversial term. After that he became chief bouncer in the Tivoli Gambling House in Ciudad Juarez, across the Mexican border from El Paso. In 1921, President Hard
ing's secretary of the interior, Albert B. Fall, pulled strings, and Baca became an Interior Department agent. When Fall fell into disgrace Baca tried to become a judge, failed at that, campaigned for election as New Mexico governor in 1934, and failed at that. He died in Albuquerque on August 27, 1945. He is buried there, in Sunset Memorial Park.
.3366 (Jko. FOUNTAIN, ALBERT JENNINGS
BACA, Saturnino (1830-1925)
Saturnino Baca never killed anybody, but his name is a thread running through New Mexico's Lincoln County War. He was born on November 29, 1830, at Cebolleta, Valencia County, New Mexico. At the time of his birth, New Mexico belonged to Old Mexico. On September 15, 1855, he married Juana Chavez. The marriage survived 50 years, and the couple had nine children. Prior to the Civil War, Baca worked as a surveyor. He Joined the Union army, specifically the First New Mexico Cavalry, rose to lieutenant, and saw action at Valverde, New Mexico.
After the war he and his family resided in La Placita, near Fort Stanton, where he served in the territorial legislature and introduced the bill that created Lincoln County. La Placita thus became Lincoln. In 1875, Baca became sheriff of Lincoln County, hanging William Wilson on December 18, 1875. However, Wilson showed signs of life in his casket, so Baca's deputies dragged him out and hanged him again.
In July 1876, Baca arrested Jesus Largo for horse theft. A few days later Baca learned that nearby ranchers intended to hang Largo, so Baca and several deputies attempted to move the prisoner to the safety of nearby Fort Stanton. Along the way, the vigilantes caught up with the lawmen, forcibly removed the prisoner, and lynched him.
William Brady captured the sheriff's office during the next election, and Baca went back to farming, raising sheep, and raising children. During the Lincoln County War, Baca resided in a rental house owned by attorney Alexander McSween at a time when the McSween home was under siege and receiving rifle fire from a sheriff's posse. Baca permitted the sheriff's riflemen to take cover in the nearby torreon (stone fort) and thus shoot at his landlord. McSween ordered both Baca and the torreon occupants off his property. When the "war" ended with the death of McSween, Baca requested military protection, stating that the McSween Regulators (private individuals who banded together to counter perceived wrongs) held him responsible for the presence of troops. Baca insisted that several McSween desperados had already fired several rounds through his tent. He filed charges of attempted murder against some of his neighbors, but nothing came of it.
In 1889, he lost an arm in a shooting incident. Saturnino Baca lived to be 95, however. He died in Lincoln on March 7, 1925, at the home of his granddaughter.
S66 LINCOLN COUNTY WAR
BADLANDER
A badlander is an inhabitant of the badlands. While the name often has an evil connotation-a reference to someone bad, usually an outlaw-in reality both good guys and bad guys tended to avoid places like this.
BADLANDS
Badlands exist in various places around the West, but the largest and best-known district is the 244,000acre Badlands National Park, east of the South Dakota Black Hills. While many people believe the name refers to a region containing desperados hiding from the law, it generally alludes to a remote region of peaks, ridges, plateaus, gullies, eroded buttes, and mesas with little water or rainfall, minimal human and animal life, and practically no vegetation. Outlaws (as well as settlers) could exist only marginally in such a terrain, because there was little to steal, no way to farm, ranch, or operate a business, and very little to sustain life. These areas are called badlands not because of their inhabitants, if any, but because day-to-day survival there is difficult.
BADMAN
Badman can be spelled as one word or two, and in its most-used, broadest sense refers to someone outside the law, an outlaw. "Badman" in the Old West, generally meant someone wild and dangerous, a person to avoid. In modern times-in reference to the Old West-we often think of a badman as a romantic figure, a good man gone wrong, usually through bad things he had to do in order to achieve a good cause. Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and Sam Bass often fall
into this category. John Wesley Hardin thought he belonged in that group too, which is why he wrote his autobiography. Movies have also helped shape public opinion, the silver screen often depicting a badman as someone forced to flee after killing an intruder bent on some evil deed. Movies in particular are responsible for changing such groups as the Wild Bunch from badmen (meaning thugs) into "romantic" badmen, meaning misunderstood good old boys. The word "badman" was seldom used during the mid- to late 1800s.
BAD Medicine
Bad medicine originally referred to an Indian concept of spirits or dreams. Bad medicine in this case would not necessarily be evil, although that was the usual implication. Bad medicine was a strong indication that it was not a good day to commence a battle, get married, or undertake anything of any complexity or challenge.
Bad medicine in the Old West usually referred to certain individuals, people one needed to avoid. A particular lawman, for instance, might be bad medicine for outlaws.
BAKER, Cullen Montgomery (1835-1869)
The well-known Texas desperado Cullen Baker was born in Weakley County, Tennessee, but by 1839 he and his family had moved to Cass County, Texas. He married Mary Petty in January 1854, but marriage did not improve the disposition of the quarrelsome, hard-drinking man. By the Civil War, when his wife died, he had already murdered two men. During that conflict he served in various cavalry units and reportedly led a band of Arkansas guerrillas. He married Martha Foster in 1862, but she died four years later. Baker turned his fury on the Union occupation of Texas, venting his wrath in particular on the Freedmen's Bureau, which sought to help blacks make the transition from slavery to independence. Baker reportedly killed numerous black men and women, as well as soldiers of the occupying U.S. Army.
On January 6, 1869, in Cass County, Thomas Orr, whom Baker had once tried to hang, allegedly killed him by lacing Baker's liquor with strychnine. Many years later, author Louis L'Amour memorialized Baker in his novel Fart Fa9t
S66 LONGLEY, WILLIAM PRESTON
BAKER, Theodore (?-1887)
Theodore Baker isn't known for much. He wasn't a lawman or a desperado, and his only fame hinges on the fact that he was hanged twice for the same offense. The story opened with Frank Unruh, a Colfax County, New Mexico, farmer, who happened to meet a new friend in Springer, New Mexico, named Theodore Baker. Unruh invited Baker to stay at his house, apparently because his wife, Kate, needed someone to talk to while he (Unruh) was away on surveying business.
After awhile Unruh started becoming suspicious, although he did little except argue with the couple and then get drunk in the basement. When he came out the last time, he and Baker argued again and came to blows. The dispute ended with Unruh being shot twice. He stumbled outside; Baker followed him and shot him several more times. Baker then went into Springer, turned himself in, claimed self-defense, and was placed in jail. However, on the following night, outraged residents removed him from jail, took him to the nearest telegraph pole, and lynched him.
Someone cut Baker down too soon, and he recovered. Within a week Baker was loaded on a train and sent to the New Mexico State Penitentiary for safekeeping. During a newspaper interview, he provided this interesting statement: "The noose was thrown over my head and I was jerked off my feet. My senses left me for a moment and then I awakened to what seemed to be another world. The sensation was that everything about me had been multiplied a great many times. It seemed that my five executioners had grown in number until there were thousands. I saw what seemed to be a multitude of animals of all shapes and sizes."
During Baker's murder trial in San Miguel County, Mrs. Unruh turned state's evidence and went free. But her testimony sent Baker back to the territorial gallows, the difference being that this hanging would be legal.
During the afternoon of May 6, 1887, in a ceremony witnessed only by state officials, Baker spoke for a half-hour, then, tiring, turned to the executioner and said, "Let her go." This time, after Baker was cut down, he was promptly buried.
BALD Knobbers (1885)
Of all the vigilante groups in the Old West, the Bald Knobbers were the cruelest. They took their name
from Snapp's Balds, a treeless hilltop west of Kirbyville, Missouri, where on April 6, 1885, 100 or so men gathered to discuss methods of bringing law and order to Taney County. Their chieftain, a Springfield, Missouri, saloon owner named Nathaniel N. Kinney, would organize them into the largest most heartless vigilante group in western history. Under Kinney's leadership they lashed sinners (Kinney was also a preacher), in particular those accused of arson, stealing hogs, or adultery. Kinney was strongly against adultery.
Less than two weeks after the initial organizational meeting, the Bald Knobbers lynched Frank and Tubal Taylor for wounding one of the vigilantes. Yet lashing remained the group's favorite pastime. The vigilantes also scared residents out of the county just by riding past their house at midnight and tossing a bundle of switches on the porch. The switches in themselves carried a strong message.
As killings, beatings, and terror rode the land, an anti-Bald Knobbers group arose, a group knowing it could never prevail against the vigilantes so long as Nathaniel Kinney led them. Therefore, the anti-vigilante leaders, five or six men, resolved to settle their dilemma with a game of poker-the loser would kill Kinney. Billy Miles, a young farmer, evidently had no poker skills at all. His quest would take two years. Meanwhile, the Missouri adjutant general, James Jamison, warned both groups that their organizations were illegal. As a result the Bald Knobbers passed a meaningless
vote to disband, and as might be expected, did not.
But angry times were coming for the Bald Knobhers. On New Year's Day of 1888, James Berry, a merchant and mail carrier, began setting up a series of trysts with a Kansas woman. However, Mrs. Berry learned of it and retained George L. Taylor as her attorney. This infuriated James, who accused his wife and her attorney of having an affair. On February 28, 1888, Berry met Taylor on the street and threatened him with a revolver. Berry was arrested but was soon released. On April 5, the two men traded shots in the middle of a public street.
On August 18, hearings began regarding the cohabitation suit against Mrs. Berry and Taylor, and that brought out both the Bald Knobbers and the anti-Bald Knobbers, everyone carrying revolvers and rifles. For whatever reason, Kinney had inadvertently gotten himself in the middle of this quarrel; the preacher and the vigilante in him struggled for primacy. By order of the court, he took charge of the Berry store and began inventories. This brought the Bald Knobbers and anti-Bald Knobbers out into the street; Kinney bragged that the Berry possessions would soon go on sale.
On the morning of August 20, 1888, at about 10 o'clock, Billy and Jim Miles walked up the street toward the Berry store. The employees, except for Kinney, hurriedly left, and it was just as well. Both men drew weapons, and Billy Miles put a .44 slug in Kinney's forearm. Miles then shot him again, knocking the giant Kinney to the floor behind the counter. Then Miles stepped to the counter, braced himself, and shot Kinney three more times. Miles walked outside, announced that he had killed the 45-year-old Bald Knob leader in self-defense, and turned himself in to the sheriff.
Miles and Berry went on trial separately. Berry was acquitted of first degree murder but was convicted of felonious assault. He was sentenced to five years but escaped after three months and disappeared. On March 22, 1890, Billy Miles went on trial for murder and was acquitted. As for the Bald Knobbers, with their giant leader Nate Kinney dead, they disbanded.
The Encyclopedia of Lawmen, Outlaws, and Gunfighters Page 4