The Encyclopedia of Lawmen, Outlaws, and Gunfighters

by Leon Claire Metz

  Two of El Paso City Marshal Dallas Stoudenmire's personal revolvers (Navy Colts .36-caliber percussion models 1851) (Author's Collection)

  Still, cooler heads prevailed. Interested parties brought the Manning brothers and Stoudenmire together, and everyone agreed to a peace treaty. Here is how the El Paso Daily Herald, of April 16, 1882, worded it:

  we the undersigned parties having this day settled all differences and unfriendly feelings existing between acs, hereby agree that we will hereafter meet and pass each other on friendly terms, and that bygones shall be bygones, and that we shall never allude in the future to any past animosities that have existed between us.

  Signing a peace treaty, however, might have made the citizens and politicians feel better, but it failed to ease the smouldering animosities. Stoudenmire sometimes drank so heavily that he would slide off the bar stool, sprawl across on the wooden floor, and loudly snore. No one dared awaken him.

  Something had to be done, so the mayor and city council gathered for a special meeting on the evening of May 27. They invited Dallas Stoudenmire to explain why he should not be dismissed as city marshal. The marshal walked in twirling a six-shooter on his finger, and spoke only one sentence: "I can straddle every God damned alderman in this room." Then he turned around and left. In the silence that followed, one of the aldermen turned to the mayor and the others and said, "I don't know about you folks, but I'm not voting to dismiss him."

  But even Stoudenmire realized it was over. The mayor and aldermen had met on Friday. By Monday, the marshal had sobered and decided to do the right thing. He wrote out his own resignation. On the following day, the federal government appointed him to the position of U.S. deputy marshal, with headquarters in El Paso. Stoudenmire's former deputy and ex-Texas Ranger James B. Gillett became city marshal.

  El Paso City Marshal Dallas Stoudenmire in 1881 (Western History Collection, University of Oklahoma)

  In early September, U.S. Deputy Marshal Dallas Stoudenmire, with a wad of fugitive warrants folded in his shirt pocket, took the train to Deming, New Mexico. He returned to El Paso around 10 o'clock that night. A conductor poured him off the train. He then wandered down to the Manning Saloon, walked in and looked around, then stumbled down to "the line," a row of brothels, where he spent the night.

  Upon arising the next morning, one of the first things he heard was that the Manning brothers were looking for him-and planned to kill him. "Why do they want to kill me?" mumbled Stoudenmire. "Because you were looking for them in their saloon last night," came the answer. Stoudenmire responded that a mistake had been made. He had not been looking for the Mannings but for other wanted individuals.

  Well, a mistake in judgment had obviously been made; all day long emissaries hustled back and forth between the Mannings and Stoudenmire. As a result, the disputants agreed to meet that afternoon in the Manning Saloon and sign another peace treaty.

  Stoudenmire walked in and found James and Doc Manning playing pool. "Where's Frank?" he asked. Jim glanced around, said "I'll go find him," and left.

  Doc and Dallas now bellied up to the bar and ordered drinks. Stoudenmire, who already had had too many, began mumbling that too many people around town were telling lies. The little doctor snapped, "Stoudenmire, you are the liar." The two men now reached for their guns, the little doctor evidently already having his hand in his coat pocket. His first shot hit the marshal in the shoulder, and Stoudenmire's weapon clunked to the floor. The doctor cocked and fired again, this time the bullet striking the marshal squarely in the shirt pocket, where it buried itself in that folded wad of wanted notices. Nevertheless, the impact knocked Stoudenmire backward through the bat-wing doors and out onto El Paso Street.

  The doctor followed him outside, intending to kill him, but by this time Stoudenmire had his other weapon in hand. He fired, and the bullet struck the doctor in the arm, the doctor's weapon spinning into the dirt. Stoudenmire, now in severe pain and breathing heavily, bent over and struggled to recock his six shooter between his knees. Doc Manning, however, ran up and wrapped both arms around the marshal. The two men reeled against the wall, the doctor hanging on to stay alive, the marshal struggling to shake him loose and kill him.

  By this time, James Manning, who had gone to look for Frank and had heard shooting back at the saloon, came on the run and found the two men wrestling, twisting, and turning, bouncing off the Manning Saloon's outside wall. Frank reached into his pocket, pulled out his own six-shooter, cocked it, aimed at Stoudenmire's bobbing and weaving head, jerked the trigger, fired, missed, and shattered a barber pole. Frank cocked it again, aimed once more, and fired. This time the bullet struck Stoudenmire behind the right ear; the former marshal collapsed in the dirt with a screaming Doc Manning on top of him.

  The county seat, Ysleta, tried the Mannings for murder and acquitted them. Within two years they were gone from El Paso. Frank died in the Arizona Home for the Insane. Doc practiced medicine in Scottsdale, Arizona, and died there. James wandered the West for many years. He died in Los Angeles and is buried in Forest Lawn.

  As for Dallas Stoudenmire, the El Paso Masonic Society bought him a $15 suit and shipped him to Columbus, Texas, for burial.

  S66 GILLETT, JAMES BUCHANAN

  SUNDANCE Kid

  LONGABAUGH, HARRY

  SUTTON-TAYLOR Feud

  This, the longest and bloodiest feud in Texas history, took its name from the two leading warring families-the Suttons and the Taylors. The feud had its roots in the Civil War, the trouble starting in DeWitt County, which was about halfway between San Antonio and the Gulf Coast. Here shotguns, sixshooters, lynch ropes, and graves were common solutions to complex social and racial problems.

  William Sutton was born in 1846, and although he fought for the Confederacy, he supported the Union occupation of Texas. He represented the Suttons in the Sutton-Taylor feud, although he had powerful ranching allies, such as James W. Cox and Joseph Tumlinson. He also had support from Union general Joe Reynolds, the military commander of Texas. Reynolds

  selected the mean-spirited Jack Helm as a leader of "the Regulators," a group of special officers hired primarily to enforce the Sutton point of view.

  Jack Helm later wrote that he had "been summoned by military authorities to arrest desperados in Texas known as the Taylor Party, "party" being a colloquialism for gang, group, or faction. Helms described them as about 40 in number, and by newspaper count his own righteous "party" had already killed around 21 persons in two months.

  Two leaders of the Taylor party, Hays and Doboy Taylor, plus some of their friends and kinfolk, killed a black sergeant in a saloon at Mason, Texas, during 1867. Fort Mason's Major Thompson subsequently tried to arrest the Taylors and was shot dead, allegedly by Doboy Taylor.

  In 1868, the 22-year-old Billy Sutton, as a deputy sheriff in a Helm posse, caught up with several accused Taylor outlaws, and during a running gun battle the posse killed Charlie Taylor. In late August 1869, Helm and his Regulators approached the Creed Taylor Ranch, where a brief gun battle occurred, Hays Taylor being the only one slain. Doboy was wounded but escaped, not being killed until December 1871, when he was shot to death during a personal quarrel having nothing to do with the feud. A state of terror now existed in the Texas counties of San Patricio, Bee, DeWitt, Goliad, and Wilson.

  On July 1, 1870, Texas organized its state police, with Helm as one of four captains. During the following month, his detachment arrested Henry and Will Kelley of the Taylor faction and shot them to death on August 26 in the nearby woods. In October, with charges of brutality and embezzlement buzzing about his head, Helm was dismissed from the state police. Bill Sutton now moved up in the police leadership.

  Late one evening during the summer of 1872, Sutton and several loyalists lured Pitkin Taylor out of his home by ringing a cowbell. Taylor assumed his cattle had gotten into his cornfield and went to investigate. Several rifles cracked, and Pitkin died a short time later.

  Jim Taylor and friends now went after Wi
llie Sutton and on April 1, 1873, ambushed and wounded him in a Cuero, Texas, saloon. A month later, on May 15, the Taylors caught some of the Sutton party, specifically James W. Cox and W. S. "Jake" Christman, between Helena and Yorktown, Texas. Suddenly a cloud of black smoke engulfed the Regulators, Cox, in particular. Cox died with 19 buck shot in his body and a slashed throat. Someone had really disliked him.

  In July or August of the same year, 1873, James Taylor and John Wesley Hardin caught up with Jack Helm in a little town called Albuquerque, Texas (the town no longer exists). They blasted Helm with buckshot and six-gun bullets and rode quietly on their way.

  On the following day a large party of Taylors placed the Joe Tumlinson home near Yorktown under siege. Within hours, however, the sheriff arrived and talked both parties into signing a peace treaty, even though the peace lasted only until December 30, 1873, when someone shot and killed a Taylor man named Wiley Pridgen. An engaged group of Taylors now pinned the Suttons down in Cuero, the siege being lifted only when Joe Tumlinson rode in with a large group of Suttons.

  The feud now wound down, with few folks left to kill besides the leaders. Bill Sutton made plans to go by steamer from Indianola, Texas, across the Gulf and overland to Kansas, where some of his cattle were currently being driven. On March 11, 1874, he, his pregnant wife Laura, and a cattleman friend and employee, Gabriel Slaughter, walked up the gangplank at about two o'clock in the afternoon. However, as Sutton approached the ticket booth, James and Bill Taylor started shooting, then scrambled away amid a scene of blood, gore, two dead men, and a screaming widow.

  As for James Taylor, on May 25, 1874, he and John Wesley Hardin murdered Brown County

  deputy sheriff Charles Webb on the streets of Comanche, Texas. That killing would eventually cost Hardin nearly 16 years in the Texas State Prison. As for Taylor, his life was much shorter. He and two friends, Mace Arnold and A. R. Hendricks, died during a running gunfight with peace officers at Clinton, Texas, on December 27, 1875.

  This left only Capt. Joe Tumlinson, the final leader of the Sutton faction. With his wars behind him, it was time to go. He became ill, got religion, was baptized, and died in bed many years later.

  Bill Taylor, the other assassin of Sutton, was caught and jailed on a ship in Indianola, Texas, but swam free on September 15, 1875, when a hurricane destroyed Indianola forever. His freedom was only momentary, however. He was captured and went on trial in Texana, Texas, in May of 1878. A jury acquitted him of the Sutton slaying, and within a couple of years he had dropped from sight. The bloody Sutton-Taylor feud had finally meandered and stumbled to a close.

  .366 A50: HARDIN, JOHN WESLEY

  SWING a Wide Loop

  To "swing wide loop" meant to catch everything, even things that do not belong to you. The expression especially applied to someone rounding up livestock who did not care how many of his neighbor's cattle might also be included.

  TAGGART, Frank (1858-1884)

  Originally from Iowa, the youthful cowboy Frank Taggart drifted, when not yet out of his twenties, through parts of Utah and Arizona before temporarily alighting along the Gila River in western New Mexico. Partnering with black cowboy George Washington Cleveland, Mitch Lee, and Christopher "Kit" Joy, Taggart assisted in robbing the Southern Pacific train near Gage Station, west of Deming, on November 24, 1883. Because the robbers killed the train engineer, Theopolis C. Webster, such notables as railroad detective Len Harris, Wells Fargo detective James B. Hume, ex-Grant County sheriff Harvey Whitehill, and for a while, Deming's dangerous deputy, Dan Tucker, were all involved in the pursuit.

  Taggart, who had "a large mouth which in conversation is always wreathed in smiles," was probably not smiling when he was finally arrested near St. Johns, Arizona. Placed in jail in Silver City, Taggart and his accomplices (along with others) broke out of confinement on March 10, 1884, stealing firearms and horses. A running gun battle erupted between outlaws and posse members. Taggart was severely wounded and was captured. A local newspaperman reported, "It was here determined without a dissenting voice that Mitch Lee and Frank Taggart should, by request, attend a neck-tie party." Sensing the end was indeed near, Taggart admitted he was guilty of robbing the train but accused Mitch Lee of murdering Webster.

  One newspaper man reported that "Taggart died hard of strangulation-a throat disease that is becoming extremely common among their ilk in this section."

  .3ee rco ! CLEVELAND, GEORGE WASHINGTON; JOY, CHRISTOPHER; LEE, A. MITCHELL; TUCKER, DAVID; WHITEHILL, HARVEY HOWARD

  TASCOSA Shootout (a.k.a. the Big Fight)

  Tascosa, Texas, located in the Texas Panhandle, by any standard did not amount to much in terms of size. It still doesn't. It is remembered today primarily because of a shootout that occurred on March 21, 1886, a shootout having its roots in a cowboy strike during the spring of 1883.

  The big outfits in a sense brought the strike on themselves. Until recently the big outfits had allowed cowboys to own a few horses and run a few head of livestock, which wasn't all that big a deal, since the ranchers themselves not only operated on public land but had been taken over by large corporations and foreign owners. So in the spring of 1883, the cowboys, who had usually been paid around $35 a month, gathered together, selected a natural leader, and wrote the following proclamation:

  We the undersigned cowboys of Canadian River do by these present agree to bind ourselves into the following obligations, viz.

  First; that we will not work for less than $50 per »zo and we farther more agree no one shall work for less than $50 per »w. after 32st of zb.

  Second; Good cooks shall also receive $50

  Third, Any one an outfit shall not work for less than $75 mo.

  Any one violating the above obligations sball suffer the consequences. Those not having funds to pay board after March 32 will be provided for 30 days at Tascosa.

  Twenty-four cowboys signed it, and as of that moment, they were all on strike. Within a few weeks, the number of cowboys joining the association rose to roughly 200.

  Some of the big ranchers immediately fired their employees. Others raised their salaries $5 a month or tried to bargain individually with employees. The LS Ranch offered Tom Harris, the cowboy leader, a large jump in salary if he would stay on and identify others who should be offered more money, although not as much as asked. Harris refused, saying, "No, I'll stay with the boys." He was immediately fired.

  As it turned out, the strike lasted barely 30 days. The cowboys quickly ran out of money, primarily because they blew what they had in the saloons and brothels of Tascosa. Furthermore, Tom Harris mysteriously died. With Harris gone, the strike collapsed for lack of strong leadership. What replaced him was civil disorder.

  Most cowboys reacted bitterly against the big ranchers, and the big ranchers retaliated by blacklisting them, meaning the cowboys could not find work at any rate of pay. Some of the cowboys then began homesteading on government land, often stealing cattle from the owners and either changing the brand or, in the case of mavericks (unbranded cattle), sticking their own brands on calves even though everyone knew who they belonged to. The practice became known as "mavericking."

  The big ranchers (often referred to by cowboys as the "Syndicate") now retained Pat Garrett, the famed slayer of Billy the Kid. Garrett put together a group of gunmen he called "rangers," not to be confused with the Texas Rangers. Cowboys usually referred to them as "Pat Garrett-LS Ranch Rangers," meaning private lawmen hired and paid by the LS Ranch, and supervised and led by Pat Garrett.

  Garrett managed to get three edicts against the small ranchers. One, they could not wear firearms. Two, small-time cattlemen and owners could not participate in the big, yearly roundup on the open

  range where unbranded cattle were divided. Third, Garrett got a court decree whereby brands of beginning ranchers had no validity in law.

  What made a confusing situation even more confusing was that some of the small ranches had refused to support the cowboys, and some of the larger ra
nchers believed a settlement should be worked out with the smaller ranchers. Garrett's LS Rangers now added a third dimension, a controversial force from outside. As the entire Panhandle began forming factions, Garrett realized he was in a lose-lose situation. In disgust, he disbanded his rangers and rode off to other adventures.

  The former rangers now became cowboys and gunmen. Four of them-Fred Chilton, Frank Valley, Ed King, and John Lang-rode into Tascosa on the evening of March 20, 1886. They expected to attend a Mexican jade, and at about two in the morning they headed for the Equity Bar, near the end of Main Street. Ed King dismounted, intending to put his arms around Sally Emory, then walk toward her dwelling. But he never made it. A local cowboy named Lem Woodruff shot him dead.

  Woodruff took refuge in a saloon along with his friends-Louis ("the Animal") Bousman, Tom and Charles Emory, and the Catfish Kid. There may have been others. As they plotted, the other LS men returned-Chilton, Valley, and Lang-all three of whom commenced firing into the saloon. Two men were wounded, and four men died in "the Big Fight." Those killed were LS men Frank Valley, Ed King, Fred Chilton, plus a bystander named Jesse Sheets-who still in his bedclothes, happened to step outside his home just as the guns started banging. Charles Emory and Lem Woodruff were wounded. Both recovered.

  After daylight arrived, four coffins were fashioned from barn siding and lined. The funeral procession included almost everybody, friends and enemies, and was nearly two miles long. The accused slayers-Bousman, Woodruff, Lang, Emory, and the Catfish Kidwent on trial for murder. A jury acquitted all four.

  a, eO EMORY, THOMAS; GARRETT, PATRICK FLOYD JARVIS

  TAYLOR, Elizabeth (?-?)

  This lynching victim, born in Wales as Elizabeth Jones, came to the United States, where in 1869 she married James H. Taylor. They farmed and ranched in Clay County, Nebraska. Her husband gave her three children, but he died, some believe of poisoning, on May 27, 1882. Her father and a hired man also mysteriously disappeared. Elizabeth constantly argued and fought with her neighbors, their disputes being about cattle; most of her neighbors believed that she and her twin brother, Thomas, controlled an organized gang of cattle rustlers. One of her sons shot a neighbor during a livestock dispute.