The Encyclopedia of Lawmen, Outlaws, and Gunfighters

by Leon Claire Metz

  Sundance went to California, Logan and Carter to Texas, and Butch Cassidy possibly to Wyoming. Once they felt free, they gathered at Fort Worth, Texas, where on November 21, 1900 Harvey Logan, Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, Ben Kilpatrick, and Will Carver posed for a photograph in John Swartz's studio at 705 Main Street. Since they had been earning money and not spending much during the last few months, they had bought nice clothes. The photographer, very proud of his ability, placed a copy on display in his front window. Within a week Pinkerton detective Fred Dodge recognized Will Carver. Soon the Pinkertons knew the name of every individual in that photo.

  In the meantime, Butch Cassidy, Harvey Logan, and Ben Kilpatrick moved back to their old haunts, robbing the Great Northern Train near Wagner, Montana. On April 2, 1901, Will Carver died by a sheriff's bullet in Sonora, Texas. As for Sundance, he met a mysterious young lady known as Etta Place, who had a variety of names. She stood about five foot five, had dark hair, and was perhaps 24 years old. Her occupation was unknown, although almost certainly she was a San Antonio prostitute. When and how Sundance met her isn't known. By some accounts they married. They also toured the eastern United States, visiting his Pennsylvania family and seeing all the sights, including Niagara Falls. Then, on February 20, 1901, they took ship for Buenos Aires, Argentina, where they rendezvoused with Butch Cassidy and Harvey Logan (Kid Curry). All at least initially resided in Bolivia.

  After a few years, however, either the money ran out or the men grew restless, or both. They seem to

  have resorted to additional robberies and to have been shot to death on November 8, 1908, at San Vicente, Bolivia. Some reports indicate that Etta Place later made it back to the States, and disappeared.

  S66 (JO; BROWN'S PARK; CARVER, WILLIAM RICHARD; CASSIDY, BUTCH; HOLE-IN-THE-WALL; KILPATRICK, BENJAMIN ARNOLD; LOGAN, HARVEY; LOGAN, LONIE; ROBBERS ROOST; SIRINGO, CHARLES ANGELO; WILD BUNCH

  LONGLEY, William Preston (1851-1878)

  Bill Longley, born in Austin County, Texas, grew into one of the state's most feared gunmen, a man describing the first steps of his own career as "disobedience, next whiskey drinking, next carrying pistols, next gambling and then murder." Like many Texans of his time, Longley began his killing profession by shooting black men, the first ones in December 1868. By 1870, the state had a standing offer for Bill Longley's head.

  The young outlaw now moved east and teamed up with Cullen Baker, leader of an eastern Texas/ Louisiana gang that prowled the piney woods in search of victims as well as money. It committed theft, rape, and murder, in numbers impossible to establish. They shot the women just as easily as they shot the men.

  In order to escape encroaching posses, Longley joined a cattle drive heading for Kansas, racking up bodies along the way. During the early 1870s, he wandered as far north as Wyoming and as far east as Missouri and Arkansas. On June 22, 1870, he even joined the army; military accounts described him as nearly six feet tall, spare of frame, with black hair and whiskers, slightly stooped in shoulders, a man "easily recognized by his penetrating eyes." Longley had enlisted for five years but deserted within two weeks. He was caught, served some time pounding big rocks into little ones, then was returned to duty-only to desert again, this time for good on June 8, 1872. He made it back to Texas, allegedly committing rape and shooting Indians, black men, and fellow gamblers along the way.

  Up until now, most of the people allegedly slain by Longley had been little missed, but then he killed George Thomas, probably in Lee County, Texas. He next shot it out with Lou Shroyer in mid-January 1876 and killed him. Much of eastern Texas now had rewards out for Bill Longley, some as high as $250. On June 6, 1877, in De Soto County, Louisiana, as Longley, one of the most dangerous gunmen in Texas was hoeing, unarmed, in the middle of a cotton field, three lawmen took him into custody. The lawmen loaded Longley into a wagon and hustled him across the state line into Henderson, Texas. From there he went to Giddings and was locked in the Lee County jail.

  While in jail Longley wrote his memoirs for the claiming to have killed 32 men. (He later dropped the figure to eight, saying some of the people he shot did not die.) He was found guilty, sentenced to be hanged, and baptized in the Catholic faith. He filed a string of appeals. On October 11, 1878 the day of his hanging, he sang "Amazing Grace" in his cell, prayed, and told stories. As for the hanging, it turned into a strangulation because his feet hit the ground. Bill Longley is buried in Giddings, Texas.

  LOVE, Harry (1810-1868)

  Harry Love was born in Vermont but ran away to sea before returning and enlisting in Zachary Taylor's army during the Mexican War. Following the war he spent time in Texas, then followed the Gold Rush to California, where he mined around Mariposa. When several bandits robbed and killed Allen Ruddle, Love raised a posse for what turned into a futile pursuit. He captured only one gang member, killing him when he tried to escape.

  The California legislature now prevailed upon Love to lead a posse of California Rangers in pursuit of Joaquin Murrieta, a noted Mexican bandit upon whom the state had placed a reward of $1,000. Actually, there were five bandit gangs, each one of them headed by a man whose first name was Joaquin. Undeterred by the ambiguities, Love led a ranger posse forth, and on July 25, 1853, fought a battle with a Mexican force, killing four gang members and capturing two. Two of the dead allegedly were Joaquin Murrieta and his most trusted associate, Three Fingered Jack Garcia. Both were beheaded for evidence. The reward was duly paid.

  Within a year Love married one Mary Bennett, who owned a sawmill near Santa Cruz. The marriage

  tended to be rocky. A flood washed away the mill, and the house burned. Love ran unsuccessfully for justice of the peace in 1867. He began to drink heavily, as Mrs. Love took up with Chris Eiverson, a handyman hired by Mrs. Bennett. On June 19, 1868, as Eiverson and Mary returned from a buggy trip to town, Love met them at the gate with a revolver and a shotgun. The men commenced shooting at one another, the fight spilling over into the house and ending when Love took a severe pistol wound in the right arm. A doctor arrived and decided to amputate the arm, but overdosed his patient with chloroform. Love died. He is buried in the Santa Clara Mission Cemetery.

  .S+'+' a190: MURRIETA, JOAQUIN

  LOWE, Joe (a.k.a. Rowdy Joe) (?-1899)

  Joe Lowe, better known as Rowdy Joe Lowe, was a beefy individual with receding hairline, mustache, and goatee. He came out of Florida, but was in Missouri when the Civil War started. For a while he served in the Second Missouri Light Artillery, and after the war acted briefly as a civilian scout. Following that he opened a series of gambling and dance halls in Kansas, where he acquired the moniker "Rowdy Joe." Lowe and gambler Jim Bush were once arrested in Ellsworth, Kansas, for drugging and robbing a man, and in 1874-75 they were repeatedly indicted for gambling. Rowdy Joe reportedly married seven women, the first appropriately known as Rowdy Kate. When Joe shot and killed E. T. Beard (better known as Red Beard), his chief gambling hall competitor in Wichita, Kansas, he and Rowdy Kate fled to Luling, Texas. Over the next few years, Joe opened various gambling enterprises across the state. In 1899, a former police officer shot him to death in a Denver saloon.

  LYNCHING

  A hanging in the Old West usually referred to a legal execution by rope, whereas a lynching involved illegal mob action. Lynching parties favored tree limbs, although rafters, railroad bridges, windmills, saddle horns, wagon tongues, windows, and large rocks or cliffs were also utilized. Lynchings generally stemmed from a community breakdown in law and order, but they were not as common as media hype would lead readers to suspect. Prosecutions against participants were extremely rare, however.

  Lynch mob hanging in Ada, Oklahoma. On the left is Killin' Jim Miller, then men named Joe Allen, B. B. Burwell, and Jesse West. Note the onlookers in the back, especially the children. (University oFTexas at El Paso Archives)

  LYNN, Wiley (1900?-1932)

  Lynn was probably born in Oklahoma, where he lived most of his life and worked primarily as a Prohibition
agent. He is best known for the November 1, 1924, killing of one of the three Oklahoma

  Guardsmen-Bill Tilghman, who was trying to arrest Lynn. The slaver went free on a plea of selfdefense.

  Lynn then quit his job and moved to Madill, Oklahoma, where he drank heavily and accosted Crockett Long and others on the Madill police force. During a shootout, Long and a bystander died, another bystander was seriously wounded, and Wiley Lynn could not survive his wounds. He is buried in Madill.

  Seer eo. TILGHMAN, WILLIAM MATTHEW, JR.

  McCALL, John (a.k.a. Jack; Buffalo Curly; Bill Sutherland) (1852-1877)

  John McCall is remembered for one incident-he killed Wild Bill Hickok. He was born near Jeffersontown, Kentucky, but rambled about the West for years, reportedly working as a buffalo hunter as well as for a stage company. He arrived in Deadwood, South Dakota, probably by mid-1876. There he found employment at odd jobs.

  On August 2, 1876, as Hickok played poker in the No. 10 Saloon, the medium sized, cross-eyed McCall stepped up behind him and fired one shot. Hickok died instantly.

  A miner's jury found him not guilty, but since Deadwood was not a legally constituted community, the trial was declared illegal and moved to Yankton, South Dakota. On November 9, 1876, McCall tried to break jail, failed, and went once more to trial on December 4. A jury on January 3, 1877, sentenced McCall to hang, and the sentence was carried out on March 1.

  .Sr'e also; HICKOK, JAMES BUTLER

  McCARTY, John Thomas (1850?-?)

  John Thomas McCarty was born in Union County, Iowa, the son of a physician who after the Civil War moved first to Montana and then to Utah. There young Tom met and married Christina Christiansen, although he rarely showed up except to impregnate her. Otherwise, he spent his time stealing livestock. She died following the birth of their third child. Tom hardly noticed, and in 1877 he spent a short stretch in the Nevada State Prison for robbing a ticket agent of the Central Pacific Railroad. Following this, he teamed up with his wife's brother, Willard Erastus Christiansen, later to become better known as Wild Bunch member Matt Warner. Matt had been riding with Butch Cassidy, and through his association with Tom McCarty, the three men had made contact with one another. In 1889, the gang successfully struck the Telluride, Colorado, bank, and the Wild Bunch was in business. For a few months the gang hid out in Robbers Roost and Brown's Park, and then Warner and McCarty branched out on their own, hitting several banks, becoming so successful that the outlaws (19 of them) posed for a group photograph in Rawlins, Wyoming Territory.

  Within a brief time they were joined by Tom's brothers and nephew: George (who was caught early and served some jail time), Bill McCarty, and his son, Fred. However, more disaster followed, for in 1893 when they hit the Delta Bank in Colorado, the local residents killed Bill and Fred McCarty.

  As for Tom, he allegedly fled into Utah and disappeared, although the Tirnes of March 12, 1899, noted that $5,000 had been set aside for the capture or destruction of Tom McCarty's Blue Mountain Gang, reputed to number at least 200. During this time, however, Tom McCarty vanished, and all efforts to trace him have come to naught.

  BROWN'S PARK; CASSIDY, BUTCH; CHRISTIANSEN, WILLARD ERASTUS; LAY, WILLIAM ELLSWORTH; ROBBERS ROOST; SUNDANCE KID; WILD BUNCH

  McCULLY, Thomas (a.k.a. James Henry; Jackson) (1833?-1865)

  During the 1850s, Tom McCully reached California from Virginia, where he is thought to have been born, he and his brother Ed settling in Tuolumne County. Instead of becoming miners, however, the brothers concentrated on petty theft and brawling. During one saloon fight near Shaw's Flat, they injured a man named Fair. The case went to court, where a man named Bonds testified for Fair. (Bonds subsequently died of a knife wound administered by Edward and Tom McCully.) At their trial, Tom was sentenced to nine years at San Quentin, while Ed was lynched, with a couple of others, on December 11, 1857.

  By 1863, Tom was back in circulation, teaming up with groups who specialized in robbing mining camps populated mostly by Chinese. After being chased off by vigilantes, however, the thugs split up. McCully, who repeatedly changed his name back and forth, reportedly killed an isolated sheepherder and a stage attendant, plus others, in an orgy of murder. The California governor in late 1864 offered a $1,000 reward for Tom McCully, describing him as riding a "large, flea-bitten grey horse," (stolen, of course) and wearing "an old black coat with many holes in it." McCully may have been murderous, but he was not a prosperous murderer.

  McCully could not run forever though, and in mid-September 1865 a posse of soldiers and civilians tracked him down and shot him to death. His body briefly went on display in San Bernardino and presumably was later buried somewhere in the vicinity.

  McDANIELS, James (1852-1881?)

  On one certificate of record, Jim McDaniels asserted that he was a farmer. Certainly the auburn-haired lad from Tennessee was not lying; he did in fact farm out his gun, farmed out other peoples' livestock, and farmed out his own brand of frontier justice. It is doubtful that Jim McDaniels ever raised a tomato or planted a row of corn.

  The biographical details of the McDaniel's early life are sketchy, but Jim landed one of his first jobs at John Chisum's Home Creek Ranch in Texas. By 1872, he was riding the range in New Mexico for the "Cattle King of the Pecos." Here he earned his spurs, and tarnished them.

  McDaniels allegedly quieted a cattle camp commotion by simply shooting a black cowboy between the eyes. While working for Chisum, McDaniels both stole and recovered horses from the Mescalero Apache Reservation. McDaniels took custody of the notorious Mes brothers, who were later executed near Shedd's Ranch, on the east side of the Organ Mountains. Somewhere along the line, however, McDaniels and Chisum had a falling out, by most accounts over wages, and McDaniels ambled west toward the Rio Grande.

  On New Year's Eve in 1875, at Las Cruces, New Mexico, a bunch of Eighth Cavalry soldiers thumped the heads of a small group of cowboys. After midnight, the vanquished returned to the scene of the dance. Poking their six-shooters through the windows, McDaniels, John Kinney, Jesse Evans, and Charles "Pony Deal" Ray opened fire. Five men inside hit the floor, three with serious wounds and two killed outright. Local authorities looked the other way.

  During mid-1877, at the McDaniels mining camp of Jicarilla, Ben Reinhardt and the combatants cut each other to pieces with knives, although somehow both survived. McDaniels later in the year showed up in El Paso as a mercenary in what has been commonly referred to as the "El Paso Salt War." There he allegedly committed murder, rape, robbery, and general mayhem. In February of the following year (1878), Jim McDaniels wounded a man named H. Martin in the neck during a shooting incident at Mesilla, New Mexico.

  In July of that same year (1878), McDaniels accompanied John Kinney to Lincoln, New Mexico, and was present during the infamous "Five Day War," in which Alexander McSween and others were killed. Federal investigator Frank Warner described McDaniels as a "desperado."

  McDaniels was arrested on several occasions but died from unknown causes. One report says he died on March 2, 1881, while another indicates he returned to Texas and was killed by lawmen in Bexar County during an 1885 shootout. No doubt at some point he was declared dead, but while he lived, Jim McDaniels was a formidable adversary and a dangerously violent frontier personality.

  .See '+LICc: EVANS, JESSE J.; KINNEY, JOHN; LINCOLN COUNTY WAR; RAY, CHARLES T.

  McMASTER(S), Sherman W. (1853?-?)

  This lawman/outlaw started life in Galena, Illinois, the son of a businessman. He left home, apparently wandering for a while, perhaps visiting New Mexico, and by 1878 winding up in West Texas as a member of John Kinney's Silver City (New Mexico) Rangers. After that he switched to the James Tays Detachment of Company C, the Texas Ranger battalion stationed at Ysleta, Texas, the seat of El Paso County. McMaster had dark hair, eyes, and complexion, and stood about five feet seven inches. Practically all descriptions referred to him as short, very short. McMaster spent much of his Texas time chasing cattle rustlers and Indians, serving
honorably and well, and was discharged at Ysleta on April 12, 1879.

  Shortly after, McMaster became one of the slipperiest individuals in western history, over time becoming a Wells Fargo undercover agent, an informant, a criminal, and a lawman, but always a hired gun. After leaving Texas he teamed up with another discharged ranger named Pony Diehl. By July 30, 1880, both men had been mentioned in connection with the theft of army horses in Arizona, and by January 1881 they were being referred to as members of a Wyatt Earp posse that prevented a lynch mob from hanging "Johnny Behind the Deuce." McMaster went from there to assist with a Globe, Arizona, stage robbery on February 25, 1881, an action that later made him the subject of various Tombstone manhunts; every law officer available, including Virgil Earp and John Behan, claimed to be looking for him. As it turned out, the stage robbery charges were dropped, and from this time on McMaster gave his undying allegiance to the Earps. He would become one of their bodyguards; the Earps in turn persuaded the government to make McMaster a U.S. deputy marshal.

  Back in Tombstone on March 18, 1882, McMaster and Morgan Earp walked into the Hatch Saloon, and Earp, at least, engaged in a game of billiards. From somewhere two gunshots rang out, and Morgan Earp collapsed. McMaster dropped immediately to the floor but saw nothing to shoot at.