by Tom Clavin
It was close to 1 A.M. on the twenty-seventh as Hickok approached the saloon. Glasses were flying out into the street, tossed by Strawhun and his cowboy pals. There was quite a commotion inside the saloon; as The Leavenworth Daily Commercial reported in its October 3 edition, “The noise was fearful, all the men crying at the top of their voices, beer! Beer! And using the most obscene language.”
Hickok picked up several of the glasses that had not broken and carried them inside. Sizing up the situation, he said, “Boys, you hadn’t ought to treat a poor man in this way.” When Strawhun vowed to take the glasses from Hickok and throw them out into the street again, the marshal replied, “Do, and they will carry you out.”
Strawhun made a sudden move, either for a glass or for his gun. In any event, suddenly blood gushed from his neck, spewing from the hole Hickok’s bullet had left. He would be buried later that day in the city’s cemetery. Though severely outnumbered, Hickok, with both pistols now out, went unchallenged as the crowd inside the saloon backed down.
A coroner’s inquest was held at nine o’clock that morning. There was some contradictory testimony, probably owing to many of the witnesses having been inebriated when the shooting occurred. Hickok’s terse defense was he had “tried to restore order.” The jury agreed, declaring the death of Samuel Strawhun justifiable homicide. The Leavenworth Daily Commercial concluded its account: “Too much credit cannot be given to Wild Bill for his endeavor to rid this town of such dangerous characters as this Stranhan [sic] was.”
The news of such quick and rough justice spread fast, and during the following weeks, there was no more gunplay in the county. Still, Hickok had to be constantly on the alert for an ambush. For those who disapproved of Hays City becoming less rowdy and lawless, the easiest solution would be to get rid of the marshal. The eyesight that made him such a good marksman was in full use as he strode down the middle of the street. Few were allowed to approach him, especially from behind. If it sounded like activities in a saloon were getting out of hand, Wild Bill Hickok pushed through the doors, then, with his back to the bar, calmly said what he wanted to say. With his hands poised near the handles of his Colts, he passed back through the crowd to the street.
There was to be an election in November 1869. One would think, given his mostly successful efforts at bringing some law and order to Hays City, that Hickok would be more officially elected marshal of Hays City or sheriff of Ellis County or possibly both. The people who hired him appeared to approve of his very direct methods. In his book Buffalo Land, published just four years later, William Webb, one of the founders of the city, described Hickok as “very quiet and gentlemanly, and not at all the reckless fellow we had supposed. His form won our admiration—the shoulders of a Hercules with the waist of a girl.”
It is interesting to note that some people who encountered Hickok saw almost a feminine quality to him. Part of this had to do with his physique and perhaps also because of his dress and an unusual practice at that time on the frontier. As Joseph Rosa explained, “Hickok’s passion for taking a bath every day, at first frowned upon by the wild men of Hays, soon started a tradition, and many of them made regular trips to the bathhouse.” (In more ways than one, Wild Bill cleaned up the city.) When he dressed for the day, the lawman left buckskins behind and stepped out wearing a Prince Albert coat.
His opponent on Election Day would be Rattlesnake Pete Lanahan. Hickok may have first made his acquaintance during the Civil War. Lanahan spent those years working in the quartermaster’s department at Fort Hays and stayed on afterward as the town was being established. In February 1868, during an early effort at peacekeeping in Hays City, town fathers hired Lanahan as a city policeman. This lasted only a few months patrolling what The Junction City Weekly Union dubbed the “Sodom of the Plains”; then Lanahan sought the safety of the fort, returning to work there. When Hickok was placed in control in August 1869, one of his first acts was to appoint Lanahan as a deputy.
He had proven to be a good lawman. And Lanahan, running on the Democratic line, proved to be a good candidate, too. Hickok, listed as Independent, lost the election 114–89. His defeat could be attributed to more citizens fearing Hickok than liking him, or he was simply a victim of numbers, as most voters in Ellis County were registered Democrats.
Especially since his trusted deputy had won, Hickok must not have had any hard feelings about losing yet another election, because instead of mounting up and moving on after the last vote was counted, he agreed to serve through the transition to Lanahan’s taking office. For Lanahan’s sake, too bad Hickok didn’t stay on longer. Lanahan was not the feared shootist Wild Bill had been, and while that was fine with solid citizens, the rowdier element saw opportunities. Lanahan found it harder and harder to keep the peace, and one night in July 1871, he lost his job … permanently.
It was a setup. Several men began fighting in a Tenth Street saloon. When Lanahan arrived to break up the brawl, he was greeted with two bullets in the chest. Lanahan lingered for a couple of days in his room at the courthouse building, then died. One of the men who fired at him was Charles Harris, the saloon’s bartender. Rattlesnake Pete had some satisfaction that he had managed to get off one shot, striking Harris in the head and killing him.
Back before Lanahan’s tenure began, Hickok had to think December 1869 would be quiet, even in Hays City. He had not counted on a fighter named Patterson and his boxing ring. He was as professional as a boxer could be in the late 1860s and had come to introduce what would later be called the “sweet science” to the frontier. He set up a ring in Hays City and began to demonstrate the art of pugilism and its advantages over barroom brawling. When spectators were not impressed enough to pay real money to witness these demonstrations, Patterson decided he had to raise his profile. He had noticed the slender, long-haired marshal and figured without his guns he would be an easy conquest.
He approached Hickok in Drum’s saloon and challenged him to a fight. The marshal was puzzled, with his adversary not wearing any weapons. Patterson explained, “I’m told you’re the toughest man on the frontier. I’ll prove you’re not, with my bare hands.”
Grinning, Hickok sized up the larger man, then invited him to step outside. Those in the saloon followed them out and were immediately joined by other onlookers. Patterson went into something of a crouch, what passed then as a boxer’s stance. (It would not be until 1889 that the Marquess of Queensberry Rules were used in the United States.) When Patterson began to advance, Hickok assumed the fight had begun. It lasted less than five minutes and was deemed over when buckets of water from the nearest horse trough were splashed onto Patterson to revive him. He was soon plying his brand of pugilism elsewhere on the frontier.
The Topeka House was a hotel in the capital of Kansas, and Hickok went there when he left Hays City. With a new decade about to begin, the thirty-two-year-old man-killer and ex-marshal had to ponder what would be the next chapter in his life. He could not have known that his experience in Hays City of being a lawman in a lawless town had been a sort of a dress rehearsal for being a lawman in Abilene.
Chapter Twelve
THE TWO-FISTED MARSHAL
When the construction of Drovers Cottage was completed in 1868, it represented Abilene’s potential as a cow town. That potential was fulfilled, but at a cost. Abilene also came to represent the lawlessness and violence of the Kansas cow towns that put prosperity above peacekeeping. When the latter became a priority for the citizenry, the way was paved for two lawmen to take over a daunting responsibility. One of them was Wild Bill Hickok.
As mentioned previously, Timothy Hersey deserves much credit for the founding of Abilene, but it was Joseph McCoy who set it on the road to being a boomtown. In the fall of 1867, he and his two older brothers arrived in what was then a rather sleepy settlement. Though still young men, they had experience in the cattle trade, running their own business in Springfield, Illinois. Joseph McCoy, in particular, was a visionary. He added together the facts that t
here were tens of thousands of cattle in Texas and the Kansas Pacific Railway was working its way west, and the sum was somewhere in Kansas there was a place that would generate huge profits.
Earlier that year, McCoy had visited the offices of Kansas Pacific in St. Louis. He tried to persuade executives there to relocate the company’s stockyards from Sedalia, Missouri, to Kansas. McCoy offered two sensible reasons, the first being a combination stockyards and a railroad station in Kansas made for shorter cattle drives up from Texas, and that meant less wear and tear on the beef. The other reason was a tad more complicated.
Though the Civil War had ended two years earlier and the free state versus slave state issue was thus rendered moot, Jayhawkers still existed. Most of them were men mustered out of the military who were unable or unwilling to find gainful employment. Instead, groups of Jayhawkers patrolled the prairie for cattle being driven north and east, and they exacted a form of protection. Trail bosses were offered safe passage in exchange for tribute, the exact amount determined by the size of the herd or the number of guns backing the boss up. A shorter and more direct route to a rail hub would make it easier for the trail drovers to protect themselves, and the Jayhawkers would eventually, finally, fade away.
To his surprise, McCoy’s proposal was rejected. The executives did not trust the young stranger enough to make such an expensive move, and they feared the jilted Jayhawkers would turn their attention to the railroad itself. Plan B: McCoy bought a Kansas Pacific ticket and rode the rails until they ended, which at that time was at a water station in Ellis, Kansas. There he gathered what maps he could and saw that the small town of Abilene 130 miles to the east was directly north of Caldwell, the first stop in Kansas on the Chisholm Trail. He had actually passed Abilene on his way west and recalled it did not have a station; the train had slowed only to toss out a bag of mail. It may have taken a few dollars, but during the return trip, McCoy persuaded the train crew to stop and let him off on the side of the tracks in Abilene.
According to the historian Robert Dykstra in The Cattle Towns, McCoy was “a slender figure in unpretentious garb—heavy boots, short topcoat, black slouch hat—the goatee that hid a weak chin lending age to his twenty-nine years, his bland, ascetic visage concealing qualities both good and bad: a brilliant entrepreneurial imagination, a tenacious fixity of purpose, but also a somewhat undisciplined ego that frequently impelled him to an overconfidence in his personal mastery.”
The townsfolk were polite enough to the stranger, and McCoy was directed to the home of Timothy Hersey. It was something of a passing-of-the-baton meeting. Hersey took his visitor on a ride south to the Smoky Hill River. There, McCoy observed bottomland bursting with buffalo grass, an easily fordable river, and pure drinking water. By July, he was a landowner on the east side of the Smoky Hill.
With some urgency, before someone else had the same idea but for a different town, McCoy set about having stockyards constructed. Lumber arrived from Hannibal, Missouri, and the Kansas Pacific was happy enough to take his money for railroad ties. While this project was progressing, the brothers James and William McCoy went south to Texas to spread circulars, take out advertisements in newspapers, and personally visit ranchers to let it be known that Abilene was the place to send and sell their cattle. From Abilene, Joseph McCoy dispatched a work crew to extend and mark the Chisholm Trail from Caldwell north.
Next on his to-do list was to build Drovers Cottage.1 The name does not do justice to McCoy’s plans—it would be for drovers as well as other businessmen, all right, but would hardly be a modest cottage. There would be eighty rooms, a spacious dining room, and a saloon with comfortable furnishings and the best liquor, certainly not any sod-house swill. McCoy wanted Abilene to be ready, willing, and able to accommodate the expected herds of prime beef from Texas.
He miscalculated, in the sense that his vision was realized too quickly. When cattle began to arrive, the construction projects remained incomplete and buyers from the big cities had not yet come to town. Tents and other temporary structures were erected to contain the first hundreds of head of cattle. Then a bigger herd arrived, owned by Colonel O. W. Wheeler, who was from California but was partnered with two Texans. Their original plan had been to take the cattle bought in the Lone Star State and drive them to Kansas, then make a left turn and head west to California. But along the way, the cattlemen were bedeviled by horrible weather, Indians, and a cholera outbreak. When Wheeler and his partners, in a sour mood and ready to abandon their plan, got to Caldwell, they were told about what the McCoy brothers were trying to do in Abilene. Wheeler went there to see if the herd could be sold.
By the time he arrived, so had buyers. Wheeler was wined and dined in what was a partially completed dining room in the Drovers Cottage. His nightmare was over. He sold his herd, and on September 5, 1867, the train that headed east from Abilene carried car after car of cattle. By the end of the year, thirty-five thousand head were shipped. The McCoys had a financial piece of every cow.
During the next three years, there were some setbacks, including the flooding of the town caused by an overflowing Mud Creek, fears of “Spanish fever” that made some buyers look elsewhere for beef,2 and periods of drought and dust storms. But otherwise, Abilene prospered. Through 1870, there was a steady stream of Texas cattle going from the trail to the stockyards in Abilene, then onto train cars taking them to the eastern markets. Abilene was by no means the first Kansas cow town, but it became the busiest one as saloons and boardinghouses and dance halls and various shops blossomed. The previous year, 1869, saw 160,000 head of cattle be shipped out of the city.
And all that beef was escorted north by cowboys, who became increasingly trail-weary and thirsty as they went. In his Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest, Joseph McCoy offers a vivid portrait of this particular human species based on his Abilene observations:
He lives hard, works hard, has but a few comforts and fewer necessities. He has but little, if any, taste for reading. He enjoys a coarse practical joke or a smutty story; loves danger but abhors labor of the common kind; never tires riding, never wants to walk, no matter how short the distance he desires to go. He would rather fight with pistols than pray; loves tobacco, liquor and women better than any other trinity. His clothes are coarse and substantial, few in number and often of the gaudy pattern. The “sombrero” and large spurs are inevitable accompaniments.
Appropriately, Texas Street—more a section of town than a single street—was the epicenter of exuberant cowboy merriment. The whiskey and the women were cheap, and there was plenty of the former. Alas, before long, life was considered cheap, too. With guns as readily available as shots of whiskey, confrontations quickly escalated. This could be bad for business. Drovers Cottage had been finished and was regarded as the best hotel to be found west of Kansas City until Denver, and it was seeking to cater to a moneyed clientele. However, Abilene’s reputation was more based on its being an anything-goes oasis for parched and lusty men who had spent weeks in clouds of dust and insects on the trails up from Texas.
According to Stewart Verckler in Cowtown Abilene, the typical Texas cowboy in town
gulped his whiskey straight at the bar of the many saloons. He was quick to anger and argue, having a short temper, but would side quickly with another who had ridden the trail with him. He did not get a large sum of money for riding the trail [; his] salary would vary from fifteen to twenty dollars per month. His money was gone in less than a week, and there was always another trail herd on the way, the merchants and saloonkeepers thought. The cowboy would have no regrets about shooting up a saloon. They had courage, six-gun courage.
Joseph McCoy, T. C. Henry, and other business and civic leaders were having some misgivings about what they had created. Sure, they were making money hand over fist, but such prosperity would be short-lived if a pile of dead cowboys persuaded trail bosses to take their herds elsewhere. The ongoing westward extension of the railroads was creating other candida
tes. And cowboys killing cowboys was one thing; worse would be the violence getting so out of hand that everyday citizens, even women and children, were becoming caught in the cross fire.
The local government, with Henry as mayor, desired law enforcement. However, the first two marshals hired were chased out of town by gleeful cowboy gunfire. Chaos continued to threaten to reign, with each herd arriving bringing with it cowboys seeming to be thirstier and rowdier than the last batch. But there would soon be a new marshal in town: one day in the spring of 1870, Tom Smith rode into town and tied up his two matching gray horses in front of T. C. Henry’s real estate office.
Thomas “Bear River” Smith had earned a good reputation as a bare-knuckled battler of crime in the New York City Police Department, with his beat including the brutal Bowery section. It sounds like a bit of blarney, but an account offered by the Abilene historian Henry Jameson contends that sometime during the Civil War, Smith was chasing a teenage robber down an alley, and when he stumbled, his gun discharged, killing the boy. Feeling guilt over this tragedy and shying away from the resulting headlines, and mourning the recent death of his mother, Smith—who had also been a prizefighter known as the “Slugging Newsboy”—decided to start over away from New York and its mean streets. Whatever the real motivation was, Smith left New York and wound up in Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado as a freight hauler. His nickname was earned when working construction for the Union Pacific Railroad in the Bear River area of Wyoming in 1868.
In the towns there, off-duty railroad workers could be like the rowdy trail riders in the Kansas cow towns. In some settlements, vigilance committees were formed to apprehend the most drunk and belligerent. One day, three railroad workers were nabbed, and preparations were under way to hang them. Smith led a sort of vigilante group of his own, which freed the workers, burned down the jail, and apprehended several committee members. Things escalated to gunfire between the two sides, with fourteen men being killed and Smith wounded by a man named Nuckles. Peace was restored only after army cavalry arrived.