The Encyclopedia of Lawmen, Outlaws, and Gunfighters

by Leon Claire Metz

  With practically no information about the location of anybody, the lawmen waited until midmorning, then slowly drove their wagons from two different directions into town, not knowing where to go, who exactly was there, or even what most of the outlaws looked like. At about 9 A.M., one of the lawmen, Dick Speed, asked a 14-year-old boy who it was that was coming toward them on horseback. The boy stopped, turned and pointed, saying, "Why, that's Bitter Creek."

  The outlaw saw and heard it all. Bitter Creek jerked out his rifle, and the battle commenced. Speed fired, his bullet hitting Newcomb's rifle and sending splinters into the outlaw's hands, arms, and body. Newcomb turned and lurched for cover, while his associates in Ransom's Saloon commenced firing, pinning down the lawmen. Meanwhile, at the OK Hotel, Arkansas Tom looked out the window, saw what was happening, and from the window put a bullet in Speed, who went down wallowing in blood.

  The lawmen now tried circling the saloon, ordering those inside to surrender. The firing just got heavier. As it was, the lawmen-though they shot the saloon into splinters-could not see the south side of the saloon and so never saw the desperadoes fleeing to the stable. There, Doolin and Dynamite Dick

  managed to saddle their horses and escape, while lawman Tom Hueston went down with several bullets in his body.

  The outlaws scampered out of town; only the wounded remained. Arkansas Tom, who from his hotel room had provided such remarkable cover for his outlaw friends, was soon forced to surrender and was taken into custody.

  With that, the battle ended. It had lasted an hour or so, and the dirt streets had blood all over them. Speed was dead. Shadley and Hueston were seriously wounded; both died within 24 hours.

  As for the outlaws, the captured Arkansas Tom received 50 years in prison. He was released after several years but then robbed a bank, dying in 1924, when lawmen shot him to death. They did the same for Tulsa Jack Blake. Charley Pierce and Bitter Creek Newcomb were killed by friends named Dunn who wanted the reward money. Dynamite Dick Clifton lived until 1897, when a party of U.S. deputy marshals shot him to death. On September 25, 1895, the marshals surprised Dalton, who leaped through a back window and tried to run. He got only a few steps. As for Bill Doolin, Heck Thomas and a posse caught up with him in Oklahoma, where Thomas riddled him with 20 buckshot pellets fired from an eight-gauge shotgun. He was buried in a Stillwater, Oklahoma, cemetery, a buggy axle for a monument.

  The era of wild, hard-riding outlaws and lawmen had ended. As for Ingalls, it could not outlive its reputation. The only two churches couldn't stop quarreling until somebody dynamited one of them. Then the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe chose a different route for its track, so the end of a town came that few would dispute was already dead anyway.

  -366 0190! DALTON BROTHERS; DOOLIN, WILLIAM M.; MADSEN, CHRISTIAN; NEWCOMB, GEORGE; THOMAS, HENRY ANDREW; TILGHMAN, WILLIAM MATTHEW JR.

  GUNFIGHT at Newton, Kansas

  The western gun battle that killed the most men took place in Newton, Kansas. In July 1871, the railroads reached Newton, a cow town of perhaps 15,000 residents, the most wicked community in Kansas. Arthur Dulaney (or Donovan), known in Kansas as Mike McCluskie, a former section boss for the railroad, became the night policeman. On August 11, 1871, an important city bond election took place, and the village hired Texas gunman William Bailey (Baylor) to oversee it, the difficulty being that Bailey was too soused to oversee anything. So McCluskie was brought in to oversee the overseer and wound up cussing him out. Later that evening, in the Red Front Saloon, Bailey picked a fistfight with McCluskie. The brawl terminated in the street, with McCluskie shooting and killing Bailey.

  McCluskie thereafter left town for a few days, then returned, hoping things had blown over. He headed initially for Perry Tuttle's Dance Hall, where he proceeded to drink and gamble. It didn't take long for a group of Texas cowhands, led by Hugh Anderson, who had come up from Salado, Texas, on a cattle drive, to seek an opportunity to avenge Bailey's death. At some time after midnight on August 20, Anderson found McCluskie in the dance hall. After a brief argument punctuated by profanity, Anderson shot McCluskie in the neck. At this minute the gunfire became general, seeming to erupt from everywhere. When McCluskie's six-shooter misfired, Anderson and perhaps others shot him a few more times. A couple of railroad men, perhaps friends of McCluskie's, also went down. A young, scrawny, teenage tubercular named James Riley saw his friend McCluskie sprawled on the floor, so Riley locked the saloon door, pulled his own revolver, and commenced shooting. He hit Anderson once in each leg, then killed two cowboys and wounded two others.

  McCluskie died the next morning. Hugh Anderson survived, thanks to good medical attention. Altogether, five were dead, and three were wounded. The wildest shootout in western history had ended. Perry Tuttle spent hours mopping up the blood. The story itself did not end, however, for another two years, in June 1873, at Medicine Lodge, Kansas. It seems that McCluskie had a brother named Arthur who tracked Hugh Anderson across the West and eventually to Medicine Lodge. He sent out a challenge, and the two men met on a grassy lot at 20 paces. The two shot each other practically to smithereens, then fell to the ground with guns empty, unable to rise. While the whole mesmerized town watched, they painfully crawled toward one another and finished the fight by killing each other with knives.

  As for Jim Riley, he simply disappeared.

  GUNFIGHT at the OK Corral

  In this, the most famous gunfight in western history, it is well to point out that it was not a shootout

  between good guys and bad guys. Although one side wore badges, it was also not a battle between the law and the lawless. It was a battle of personal animosities between two groups; hate was the common denominator. The participants on one side were Virgil Earp, chief of the Tombstone police, and deputies Wyatt Earp, Morgan Earp, and Doc Holliday. The other group consisted of two sets of brothers, all Cowboys-Ike and Billy Clanton, and Frank and Tom McLaury.

  The events started when Ike Clanton and Tom McLaury left the range and reached Tombstone on October 25. While Ike (who would claim to have been unarmed) was eating lunch in the Occidental Saloon, Doc Holliday entered the room, cursed him, and dared him to go for his gun. Ike declined and left the building. Later on, Ike along with Virgil Earp, Tom McLaury, and others gambled the night away. Ike was up early enough to commence his morning by making threats against his enemies.

  At about noon, Morgan and Virgil Earp walked up behind Ike Clanton on the street, pistol-whipped him against the wall, then hustled him off to a justice of the peace who fined him $25 for carrying a weapon.

  At about 1:30, Tom McLaury checked his gun, then started up the street with both hands in his pockets, only to bump into Wyatt Earp. Wyatt slapped him, struck him across the head several times with a revolver, then continued on his way. In the meantime, Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton reached town, heard what happened, and apparently not being armed, purchased revolvers. It was now midafternoon, and the Clantons and McLaurys met in a vacant lot on the south side of Fremont Street, a few steps from, but not in, the OK Corral.

  The two groups-Earps and Holliday, and the Clantons and McLaurys-now cursed each other from their respective locations, a major difference being that the Earps and Holliday were moving toward the Clantons and McLaurys. The Earps and Holliday wanted a showdown; the Clantons and McLaurys probably just wanted to leave. To ease the latter possibility along, Sheriff Johnny Behan searched and conferred with the Cowboys, stating later that he found only Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury armed.

  Behan, seeing the Earps approaching, hurried over to say that he had disarmed the Cowboys and they were departing. Wyatt Earp brushed him aside.

  As the two sides came together, the words flew, and suddenly the guns started to pop. Frank McLaury went down with a bullet in his stomach. Billy Clanton took a bullet in the chest. Everybody seemed to be firing at once. Only Ike Clanton fled, rushing up to Wyatt Earp and screaming he wasn't armed before disappearing into the nearby Fly's Photography Studio. Under any ot
her circumstances, Tom McLaury might have looked hilarious as he scrambled around trying to get his rifle out of the saddle boot, his frightened horse bucking in terror. Doc Holliday emptied a shotgun into him.

  The shootout lasted perhaps 30 seconds. It ended with 19-year-old Billy Clanton down, still trying to shoot, gasping out his last breaths, only seconds away from death, and by some accounts begging unseen individuals for more ammunition. Thirtythree-year-old Frank McLaury was dead, and his 28year-old brother Tom was only seconds away from death. Only Ike Clanton had escaped.

  As for the Earp side, Doc Holliday had a minor hip wound. Morgan had a serious but not fatal hole through both shoulders. Virgil took a wound in the calf of his right leg. Wyatt emerged unscathed. Most of the wounds had come from Billy Clanton.

  The funerals took place at Boot Hill on October 27. The bodies were laid side by side, the headboard inscription reading, "Murdered on the Streets of Tombstone." Two days later, Mayor John Clum and his city council suspended Virgil Earp as chief of police. Ike Clanton filed murder complaints, and Sheriff Behan arrested Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday and kept them behind bars for a month. The other Earps were not arrested, since they were confined to bed with wounds.

  On November 30, 1881, Judge Wells Spicer stated, among other things, "I am of the opinion that the defendant Virgil Earp, as chief of police, by subsequently calling upon Wyatt Earp and J. H. Holliday to assist him in arresting and disarming the Clantons and McLaurys, committed an injudicious and censurable act; and although in this he acted incautiously and without proper circumspection, yet when we consider the condition of affairs incident to a frontier country; the lawlessness and disregard for human life; the existence of a law-defying element in our midst; the fear and feeling of insecurity that has existed; the supposed prevalence of bad, desperate and reckless men who have been a terror to the country, and kept away capital and enterprise, and con

  sidering the many threats that have been made against the Earps, I can attach no criminality to this unwise act. Considering all the testimony together, I am of the opinion that the weight of evidence sustains and corroborates the testimony of Wyatt and Virgil Earp, and that their demand for a surrender was met by William Clanton and Frank McLaury drawing their pistols. Upon this hypothesis my duty is clear." He then read further, but at length judge Spicer found Earp and Holliday not guilty of attempted murder and ordered them released.

  Who was to blame for this gunfight? Probably everyone involved was. Who emerged as the good guys? When the smoke cleared, the Earps and Doc Holiday were practically the only ones standing, so they all provided supportive points of view. Only Ike Clanton and John Behan had something to say for their side, but by then almost no one was listening. The Gunfight at the OK Corral now belonged to the historians and the mythmakers.

  .S1'6 BOOT HILL; EARP, MORGAN; EARP, VIRGIL; EARP, WYATT BERRY STAPP; HOLLIDAY, JOHN HENRY

  GUNFIGHT at Poplar Grove, Washington

  This shootout took place at Kennewick, Washington, on October 31, 1906, between several rows of poplar trees at the south end of the Northern Pacific Bridge. It was Halloween night.

  The story begins a night earlier with the burglary of two Kennewick stores, one handling general merchandise and the other hardware. The report reached Kennewick's marshal, Mike Glover, who telegraphed Sheriff Alex G. McNeal, who arrived by train at 10 A.M. At this time Glover, McNeal, Deputy Sheriff Joe Holzhey, and an unarmed townsman named H. E. Roseman decided to check out Poplar Grove first, it being the local hobo jungle.

  As the lawmen approached the campfire, some words were shouted, and then shooting commenced. Roseman scampered away as Holzhey dropped at the first shot. Glover also fell, and McNeal, although wounded, answered the fusillade until his gun clicked empty, at which time he eased back toward the railroad tracks. Roseman meanwhile had located Sheriff McNeal and steered him back toward Kennewick, where a posse quickly formed and galloped toward the grove. It found Glover dead and Holzhey severely wounded. He would die the next day.

  The posse also located the body of outlaw Jacob Lake, but the second gunman had vanished. By dark of the following day, a Walla Walla prison guard and a pack of bloodhounds arrived, and now a posse of 200 men took up the search and chase. It became an epic, tragic affair. A 24-year-old posse member named Forrest Perry became the first to intercept the outlaws. Perry shouted, "Throw up your hands." The other posse members, coming along behind, heard him shout, did not recognize his voice, and fired into the brush. Perry died three hours later, and the last outlaw, Kid Barker, surrendered shortly after that, denying he had shot anyone. He went to jail but escaped shortly afterward. Barker was never recaptured.

  GUNFIGHTER

  In the broadest sense, a gunfighter was anyone highly skilled with weapons who fought with guns, specifically the Colt revolver. The term is most frequently applied to western American lawmen like Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp, although it can also be applied to outlaws, such as Billy the Kid and John Wesley Hardin. The gunfighter era began essentially with the discovery of gold in California, and the era had pretty well run its course by 1900. However,

  dime novels and western movies have lumped almost every western lawman/outlaw figure into the heroic/gunfighter category. The terms themselves, along with a similar word, sfoott, seem to have been rarely used in the American West.

  S66 490: GUNMAN

  GUNMAN

  A gunman is someone who packed a gun and did not hesitate to use it. Although the term applied primarily to outlaws, it could also include lawmen. Unlike the word carried no heroic or esoteric overtones.

  S66 490: GUNFIGHTER

  GUNSLINGER

  A gunslinger was a Hollywood showoff, since neither the term nor the person existed in the Wild West. This film gunslinger implied a desperado or lawman swinging his six-shooter out of its holster and firing it, still moving, with deadly accuracy. It never happened, and the term and the Hollywood act demonstrated little more than how silly people can be in depicting history.

  S66 WSO: GUNMAN

  HALL, Jesse Leigh (a.k.a. Lee Hall) (1849-1911)

  This Texas Ranger and military man started life in Lexington, North Carolina. Around 1869 he changed his middle name to Lee and signed on as a school teacher in Texas. Perhaps the job was too dull, because he quickly switched occupations, making one suspect that he had friends somewhere in high places. He just as quickly became a sergeant at arms in the Texas senate, as well as a deputy sheriff at Denison.

  He yearned for action, however, so he signed on as a second lieutenant in Leander McNelly's Special Force of Texas Rangers. After flushing out the Nueces Strip, he and his men transferred to Goliad, where he arrived too late to prevent a bank robbery, but not too late to drive the robbers into Mexico and then disperse a group of vigilantes. In the meantime, McNelly had stepped aside due to poor health, so Hall assumed command, one of his first tasks being to bring the Sutton-Taylor feud at least under temporary control. His report "The agony is over," wasn't quite correct, but he had the situation at least easing and moving toward peace. Then in January 1877, Texas moved Hall's forces to Victoria, reorganized the unit, and promoted Hall to first lieutenant.

  Hall subsequently scattered his men along the Nueces Strip to reduce lawlessness. Along about this time in 1880 he married Bessie Weidman, who intensely disliked the rangers and the part he played in them. When in March 1881 the Special Force

  merged with the Frontier Battalion, the new designation being Company F, Hall knew it was time to leave. Looking back, in terms of his marriage, one could argue that he was a fair success, raising five daughters. Certainly, in terms of law enforcement he had been one of the best. But in terms of cattle and business he was a dismal failure. He managed the Dull Ranch, and whether he gave it that name or someone else did is anyone's guess. But he did resolve some illegal fence-cutting activities. The government appointed him as an Anadarko Indian agent and then indicted him for embezzlement. The case was thrown out of court. />
  During the Spanish-American War, Hall raised two companies of volunteers. After the war, Hall reenlisted as a first lieutenant, supervising and leading the Macabebe Scouts in the Philippines. Following his discharge in October 1900 he seemed at loose ends, unable to refind his way. He turned to the bottle and died on March 17, 1911. He is buried in the National Cemetery at San Antonio.

  .36-15- r,Lec; MCNELLY, LEANDER H.; SUTTON-TAYLOR FEUD; TEXAS RANGERS

  HANGING Windmill

  Back in 1876, the good citizens of Las Vegas, New Mexico, erected a wooden windmill in the plaza. It consisted of two parts. Four stout posts roughly 20 feet high supported a large platform, itself perhaps 20 feet by 20 feet square. A tapering superstructure rose another 20 feet above that, and a wooden ladder connected the entire piece to the windmill near the top, the axis of the windmill being about 40 feet off the ground. Otherwise the plaza remained barren, but the windmill at least provided a conversation point as well as something for young boys to play on.

  The windmill wasn't meant to be anything other than a curiosity, a talking piece for residents enjoying the park. Three years passed, and the windmill still served its purpose, dozens of children hundreds of times having crawled all over it. Meanwhile, on June 4, 1879, Manuel Barela had taken too much of the available saloon sauce and proceeded to make a nuisance of himself. He mentioned to someone standing at the bar that he could shoot the third button off the shirt of a man standing near the door. To prove it, Barela pulled a gun, aimed, and fired, the bullet striking Jesus Morales in the face but not seriously wounding him. At this time, the situation went totally out of control; a friend of Morales's, Benigno Romero, angrily denounced Barela for the unprovoked attack. Barela then shot Romero twice, killing him.