The Encyclopedia of Lawmen, Outlaws, and Gunfighters

by Leon Claire Metz

  Edward Hart was indicted for the murder of Joe Haskins but was never apprehended. Instead, after a four-year stopover in Texas, Little Hart returned to New Mexico, aligning himself with the Murphy/Dolan faction in the Lincoln County War, specifically fighting as a member of "Peppin's posse" during the Five Day Battle at the McSween home. Afterward, Hart teamed up with such notables as the ever-dangerous John Selman, his brother Tom "Tom Cat" Selman, Bob Speakes, Reese Gobles, Jake Owens, Marion Turner, and "Rustling Bob" Irwin. However, he had ambitions for leadership, so while awaiting supper late one afternoon, "Uncle" John Selman's thumb cautiously cocked a Colt hammer. He pulled the trigger, and the bullet crashed up through the flimsy boards, tearing off the top of Edward "Little" Hart's head.

  .366 rec. HORRELL BROTHERS; LINCOLN COUNTY WAR; SELMAN, JOHN HENRY

  HART, Pearl (1814?-1955)

  Pearl Hart (not likely her real name) was born in Ontario, Canada, but her name did not become a part of American history and folklore until 1899, when she and Joe Boot robbed the Globe stage at Cane Spring, Arizona. She wasn't much more than a five-foot-three-inch wisp of a woman, who admitted (without details) to having been married and having two children. She had dark hair, grey eyes, weighed maybe 100 pounds, and possessed a certain grace and elegance. A little makeup would have done wonders, of course, as would have letting her hair grow longer and wearing dresses instead of men's clothing. But she was a working girl, and working girls looked like men-especially when robbing stage coaches. Of course, she robbed stages for various reasons: putting food on the table and, especially, feeding her seemingly insatiable appetite for morphine and cigarettes.

  On July 15, 1899, driver Henry Bacon stopped the Globe-Phoenix stage for a short rest and found himself covered by two bandits, Pearl Hart and Joe Boot, who robbed not only him but the passengers also. The bandits then headed for Benson to catch a train, but being tired from all that exertion they stopped to rest in a thicket, went to sleep, and were captured by a posse. Joe went to Florence for incarceration, while Pearl went to the Pima County jail in Tucson, which had facilities for women.

  Ed Hogan, serving time for drunk and disorderly conduct, happened to be in an opposite cell, and he and Pearl managed to communicate. During the night of October 12, 1899, someone forgot to lock a door leading to the outside. Hogan escaped. Once free, however, he broke back in again, knocked a hole in the wall and took Pearl (who had not yet even gone to trial) with him. She and Logan got as far as Deming, New Mexico, where U.S. deputy mar shal George Scarborough arrested both and returned them to the Arizona jail.

  Pearl Hart in her stagecoach-robbing days (University of Oklahoma Archives)

  Although Pearl had admitted in writing the details of the stage holdup, a Florence jury found her innocent. A furious court ordered her retried for taking the driver's revolver, and for this she got five years in the territorial prison. As for Joe Boot, he received 30 years, Pearl Hart writing, "Why the fellow hadn't an ounce of sand. While I was going through the passengers, his hands were shaking like leaves. Why if I hadn't more nerve than that, I'd jump off the earth." A newspaper account wasn't any kinder to Joe: "Boot is a weak, morphine depraved specimen of male mortality, without spirit and lacking intelligence and activity. It is plain that the woman was the leader of this partnership."

  On December 2, 1902, she left prison, thanks in large part to intervention by the Arizona governor. The Seitz. roel said she walked out in good health, free from the opium habit. She briefly toured the theater circuit and wrote some remarkably good poetry; by 1903 she was running a cigar and tobacco stand in Kansas. She died on December 30, 1955, at 84 years of age.

  .315.6 r4LORO: BOOT, JOE; SCARBOROUGH, GEORGE EDGAR, JR.

  HARTLEE, B. F. (a.k.a. Frank Hartlee) (1830?-1901)

  Frank Hardee is not well known outside the circle of western aficionados interested in gunfighting men of the Southwest, but Hartlee's reputation for raw courage and decisiveness were unquestioned by anyone-lawman or bad guy, Republican or Democrat.

  By one contemporary newspaper account, Frank "was one of the most noted characters on the Pacific Coast" and "a man of extraordinary coolness and wonderful nerve which he always maintained under the most exciting and trying circumstances." While early accounts confirm that Frank spent several years as a Los Angeles resident and participated in several desperado-chasing posses, Hartlee is best remembered for the law enforcement role he played in territorial Arizona.

  During this period, correctional officers and policemen were considered by the public as one and the same. Frank Hardee went to work as a guard at the Arizona Territorial Prison at Yuma. Numerous were his exploits, but one instance overshadowed all others.

  On the morning of October 27, 1887, eight convicts attempted to escape. Taking prison superintendent Thomas Gates hostage, the desperate men charged into the administrative offices in an effort to acquire arms. Realizing that a major security breach was at hand, John H. Behan, the assistant superintendent, rushed to the strap-iron front gate, locked it, grabbed a rifle, and dashed to the aid of a guard who was being assaulted by one of the inmates. He recaptured the perpetrator.

  From his water-tank guard station, Frank Hartlee successfully sorted out guilty parties from innocent bystanders and, with remarkable marksmanship using a short-barreled carbine, killed three attempted escapees. Prison secretary Richard Rule shot another prisoner. Meanwhile Superintendent Gates, struggling for control of the institution, was stabbed in the neck, only to be saved by prisoner Barney Riggs, who snatched a six-shooter off the floor and killed the convict. (Riggs later obtained a Christmas Day pardon for his heroic act.) When the shooting ended moments later, four convicts lay sprawled on the ground. Another would die in the prison hospital. Thomas Gates resigned as superintendent for health reasons. The territory then appointed John H. Behan as prison superintendent. It promoted Frank Hartlee to assistant superintendent.

  Still, the prison went through endless rounds of political turmoil. John Behan resigned, and Frank Hartlee was demoted, these events not being fair but anticipated, since prison positions were usually awarded along political party lines. After a 13-year career with the prison, on December 3, 1898, Frank Hartlee tendered his resignation.

  Hartlee planned to retire in Puerto Rico but settled for Nogales, Arizona. When past his 70th birthday, Frank was serving as a local constable when he died of a heart attack on November 3, 1901. Throughout the Southwest he was remembered as a "square-shooter" in his personal dealing and an absolutely "dead-shot" with a short-barreled carbine.

  .Serr BEHAN, JOHN HARRIS; RIGGS, BARNEY

  HAYS, John Coffee (a.k.a. Coffee Jack Hays) (1817-1883)

  One of the great Texas Rangers of his time, a soldier, surveyor, and politician, John Coffee Hays was born at Little Cedar Lick in Wilson County, Tennessee. He became a Mississippi surveyor but joined the Texas battle for independence, fighting with Thomas Rusk and helping bury the victims of the Golliad massacre. Following that he joined the Texas Rangers, serving under Erastus "Deaf" Smith. He quickly rose to the rank of sergeant, then captain and major. Hays became one of the first ranger commanders to adopt the Colt revolver as an effective Indian-fighting weapon; after the Texas war for independence, the big enemy proved to be Comanches. Decisive battles at Plumb Creek, Painted Rock, and Bandera Pass enhanced his reputation. He helped stop the Mexican invasion of 1842. Otherwise, he recruited and trained men in Indian fighting and frontier warfare. Captains who served under him were Big Foot Wallace, Ben and Henry McCulloch, and Samuel Walker.

  John Coffee Hays, Texas Ranger (Library of Congress)

  Hays later led his rangers (called the First Regiment, Texas Mounted Rifles) into the Mexican War, fighting alongside the U.S. Army as it marched through Mexico. The Hays units were particularly effective in repulsing Mexican guerrillas near Veracruz.

  Following the war, Hays dropped out of the rangers, tried to open a trade route between San Antonio and El Paso, and then went west, where i
n 1850 he founded Oakland, California, and became sheriff of San Francisco County. He died in 1883 and is buried in California.

  .SPE (2ISO. TEXAS RANGERS

  HEATH, John A. (1854?-1884)

  Little is known regarding the origins or early upbringing of John A. Heath, but somewhere along the line, John "bowed his neck" and ignored the good advice of his parents-who, in the absence of information to the contrary, we will credit as being reasonably honest and righteous people. By whatever route in the early 1880s, Heath reached the banks of the Trinity River at Dallas, where as a youth he was arrested for burglary on one occasion and cattle rustling on another. He also underwent police scrutiny because in partnership with a locally notorious mulatto prostitute, Georgia Morgan, Heath operated a bordello and later a downtown saloon. For reasons subject only to speculation, Heath then headed farther west and by 1883 had established a dance hall in Bisbee (other accounts say Clifton), Arizona.

  On December 8, 1883, five heavily armed desperadoes-Dan "Big Dan" Dowd, Owen W. "Red" Sample, James "Tex" Howard, William Delaney, and Daniel York "Yorkie" Kelly-robbed the Goldwater and Castenada Store, which controlled the payroll for the Copper Queen Mine. However, once inside, the bandits discovered with befuddlement that the payroll funds were yet to arrive and that the safe contained only $600. Of course, they took it-as well as a pocket watch from one of the employees.

  Out in the street, the outlaws shot down five more or less innocent bystanders, including an expectant mother, Annie Roberts. The gunmen escaped.

  A well-armed and thoroughly infuriated posse took the field. Some of the manhunters were Cochise County sheriff Jerome Ward, ex-sheriff Johnny Behan, deputies "Billy" Daniels, and Sy (CO Bryant. The town newcomer, John A. Heath, participated. After a while though, it seemed to certain posse members that Heath might be trying to misdirect them, and those suspicions were confirmed. The

  store's owner stated that five men had recently been in the area dividing up cash and then leaving in different directions. Curiously, according to the lawmen's intelligence information, and according to the rancher, the murderous thugs had earlier been observed conversing with John Heath.

  Heath, protesting his innocence, was placed under arrest. In the meantime Grant County, New Mexico, Deputy Sheriff Dan Tucker arrested York Kelly at Deming and held him for Arizona lawmen. "Red" Sample and "Tex" Howard were arrested near Clifton, Arizona Territory, still in possession of the stolen and easily identifiable pocket watch, although the timepiece had actually been given to a girlfriend. Deputy Daniels finally tracked down "Big Dan" Dowd in Old Mexico, and Mexican authorities sweetened the pot by throwing in William Delaney, whom they had recently captured. The suspects were now locked in the Cochise County jail.

  All five of the subordinate bandits were tried, convicted, and sentenced to be hanged. Heath, identified as the ringleader, argued for a separate trial but was convicted of murder in the second degree. A jury sentenced him to life in the territorial prison at Yuma, although he served only one day.

  Local citizens considered the punishment too puny, so they forcibly removed Heath, shirtless and shoeless, from jail and lynched him from a Tombstone, Arizona, telegraph pole. His last words were, "Don't mutilate my body or shoot me full of holes."

  Dr. George Goodfellow drafted the coroner's jury report: "We the jury, find that John Heath came to his death from emphysema of the lungs, a disease very common at high altitudes. In this case the disease was superinduced by strangulation, self-inflicted or otherwise."

  On March 28, 1884, the remaining five defendants were adorned with black hoods at Tombstone and given their "final launch into eternity." They, along with Heath, lie in the Tombstone Boot Hill.

  See BEHAN, JOHN HARRIS; TUCKER, DAVID

  HELL'S Half-acre

  This was a generic name for red-light districts all over the American West from Civil War times until the early 1900s. None was more famous, however, than the one in Fort Worth, Texas, even though its residents and clients often reduced the name to "the Acre." Social and business activities included prosti tution, gambling, horse racing, cock fighting, brawling, and gunfights. The area sprawled across four of the city's north-south thoroughfares, occupying roughly four acres, although the boundaries were never formalized. While war was often declared on the Acre by reform-minded editors and mayors, much of the ire was aimed at dance halls and brothels where men and women congregated, rather than at saloons, which were basically an enclave of males. The Acre also proved a home to such gunmen as Luke Short, Long-Haired Timothy Courtright, and the Wild Bunch. By 1919 the Acre had largely become history, a victim of military off-limit restrictions and religious, political, and newspaper attacks.

  .366- ako: CASSIDY, BUTCH; SHORT, LUKE; WILD BUNCH

  HENDERSON, William (a.k.a. Bill Henderson) (?-1876)

  Bill Henderson had an easily identifiable identity: he was a charter member in, some say leader of, as roguish a band of "cut-throats, robbers and cattle rustlers" as ever operated out of the Wichita Mountains near Fort Sill, Indian Territory (Oklahoma). The outlaws survived as long as they did by constantly changing legal jurisdictions, mostly by jumping back and forth across the Red River, to avoid apprehension.

  With tiresome regularity they plied their trade southward to the vicinity of Fort Griffin, Texas, where citizens weary of continually replacing stolen livestock finally had their fill of inactive court processes and lame excuses. The Tin Hat Brigade, the Fort Griffin vigilantes, captured three of Henderson's men: Charles McBride, Jim Townsend, and a man known only as Brownlee. The vigilantes left all three dangling from the same tree limb.

  Meanwhile, Bill Henderson murdered a rancher in nearby Jones County, Texas, then drove his horses toward Kansas. However, a telegraphed message reached Dodge City before the outlaws and their 26 stolen horses did. Bill Henderson and Hank Floyd were arrested by Kansas authorities practically as soon as they showed their dust-covered faces. Under guard, they were shipped to the Shackleford County jail at Albany and locked away on June 1, 1876. During the next night, June 2, 70 men disarmed the jail guards and escorted Bill Henderson and Floyd to a tree overlooking Hubbard

  Creek, perhaps a quarter-mile from the courthouse. A newspaper editor noted that "if hanging didn't put the `kibosh' on the criminal class, maybe cremation would."

  LARN, JOHN

  HICKOK, James Butler (a.k.a. Wild Bill Hickok) (1837-1876)

  The child who would become Wild Bill Hickok, perhaps the West's best known pistoleer, was born on May 27, 1837, at Homer (later Troy Grove), Illinois, the fifth of seven children by William Alonzo Hickok and Polly Butler. James grew to be slightly over six feet tall, with long auburn hair, broad shoulders, blue-gray eyes, lean hips, a flat stomach, and a strawcolored mustache. By some accounts he also had a high-pitched voice, although if so, no one ever laughed. His primary biographer, Joseph Rosa, noted that his great passion was gambling, particularly poker. That, plus his fondness of liquor and his overabundance of human frailties, brought him both good and bad times. They also brought him death. But before he fell, his two ivory-handled Colt 1851 Navy revolvers made him famous.

  James Hickok headed west in 1856 and soon became known along the Missouri/Kansas border, little realizing that practically within the decade, in January 1867, Near rfcrotPi would feature his exploits, factual and otherwise. In the meantime, he worked as a wagon master and quartermaster. The Union army retained him as a contract scout. He briefly served during the Civil War as a government detective on the provost marshal's staff at Springfield, Missouri, his assignment being to "hunt up personal property." By the time the war ended, Wild Bill was a recognizable name in the states of Missouri, Arkansas, and Kansas. Hickok also briefly became a U.S. deputy marshal. He saw service with the Seventh Cavalry for four months in 1867.

  While an accurate tally of men dead at Hickok's hands throughout his career is impossible to establish, rounding the figure off at between five and 10 would place any curious individual in the bal
lpark. The fight that firmly established Hickok's reputation became known as the Rock Creek, or McCanles, Massacre. The site was a Nebraska Territory Pony Express relay station operated by Russell, Majors, and Waddell. Hickok's station duties consisted pri marily of stock tending. When the firm went bankrupt, the property owner, David C. McCanles, ordered everyone to vacate. No one left, so McCanles, his son William Monroe McCanles, and two employees, James Good and James Gordon, rode over on July 12, 1861, to expel them. What happened next is confused, and the facts in the years since have become tenuous at best. A shotgun blastprobably fired by Hickok from inside the housekilled David McCanles. When someone else clubbed Good over the head with a hoe, he died. Gordon ran into the brush, where a shotgun killed him. Only McCanles's son escaped. A trial took place in Nebraska Territory, and the house defendants, including Hickok, were released because of insufficient evidence. As for who shot whom, no one is certain-but Hickok got most of the credit.

  Hickok kept wandering, and on July 21, 1865, in Springfield, Missouri, he and David Tutt argued. The 26-year-old Tutt, like Hickok, had been a scout (but a Confederate one) and had a string of violence haunting his own backtrail. The two men argued over a gambling debt. Hickok paid $40 and promised to ante up the additional $35 in a brief time. Tutt said Hickok owed him not $35 but $40. As an added insult, he picked up Hickok's watch as security. Tutt promised to wear the watch in the public square the following day.

  Both men put in an appearance on Friday, 6 P.M. July 21. When somewhere between 50 and 100 yards apart, they pulled their guns and fired. Tutt missed. Hickok did not. He then turned on his heel and challenged any of Tutt's friends to take up the quarrel. None of them did. Hickok went to trial on August 5 and 6 and was acquitted.