by Tom Clavin
When John Wesley Hardin hit town, the precocious gunslinger was eighteen years old and on the run from an arrest warrant in Texas. Already, the son of a Methodist preacher was a veteran man-killer. His criminal career had begun four years earlier when he was expelled from school for knifing a classmate. The following year, he gunned down a former slave on an uncle’s plantation in Moscow, Texas. Three army soldiers were dispatched to arrest him. Hardin ambushed and, depending on the account, killed one or all of them. The saying “I never killed a man who didn’t need killing” has been attributed to Hardin, and he obviously lived in needy times because he is “credited” with sending as many as thirty men to the hereafter during his entire career.
When he arrived in Abilene, Hardin had no particular plans other than to see what all the fuss was about in this particular Kansas cow town. He knew who Wild Bill Hickok was, but it is possible that at least at first the marshal did not know Hardin. Or he didn’t care all that much, if the only outstanding warrant on him was from Texas, and Hickok was not all that fond of the state. Hickok did inform the newcomer of the no-gun ordinance. In his autobiography, Hardin claims he surrendered his six-shooters using the “road agent’s spin.” His version of meeting the city marshal:
He pulled his pistol and said, “Take those pistols off. I arrest you.”
I said all right and pulled them out of the scabbard, but while he was reaching for them, I reversed them and whirled them over on him with the muzzles in his face, springing back at the same time. I told him to put his pistols up, which he did. I cursed him for being a long-haired scoundrel that would shoot a boy with his back to him (as I had been told he intended to do to me). He said, “Little Arkansaw, you have been wrongly informed.”
I shouted, “This is my fight and I’ll kill the first man that fires a gun.”
Bill said, “You are the gamest and quickest boy I ever saw. Let us compromise this matter and I will be your friend. Let us go in here and take a drink, as I want to talk to you and give you some advice.”
Chances are, Hickok would not have fallen for this trick and allowed the teenager to get the drop on him. In any case, Hardin agreed to not wear his guns while out on the town and quickly came to admire the royally dressed, legendary lawman. Hickok made Hardin a deal—the marshal would pretend he had no knowledge of the Texas warrant if the teenager refrained from killing anyone while in Abilene.
The deal about not killing anyone did not last long. One night that summer while Hardin was asleep in the American Hotel, an intruder entered. Not waiting to learn of the man’s intentions, Hardin grabbed a gun and fired, killing him. And also not waiting long enough to even pull on pants, Hardin jumped out a back window as Hickok hurried into the front lobby. Hardin landed in a small wagon, which he drove south, possibly preferring lawmen in Texas to Wild Bill’s six-shooters. Along the way, he found a cowboy and took his pants and horse. Hardin told the cowboy to return the wagon and “give Wild Bill my love.” He never set foot in Abilene again.
Hardin continued to evade capture for quite a while. He even went straight, marrying a Texas girl in Gonzales County, and they had three children. But domestic bliss didn’t last. A killing spree in 1872 ended the lives of four men, and Hardin was arrested in Cherokee County by the sheriff. He escaped from jail and fled to Brown County, where he killed a deputy sheriff, Charles Webb, in Comanche, Texas, in May 1874. Furious Texas Rangers put John B. Armstrong on the trail of Hardin, who, after collecting his wife and kids, had gone east to Florida. It wasn’t until 1877 that Hardin was located and arrested in Pensacola by Armstrong. He was found on a train, and when he grabbed his pistol, it got caught in his suspenders. His companion, nineteen-year-old James Mann, was less clumsy but also less of a marksman. His bullet went through the hat of Armstrong, who shot Mann in the chest, killing him.
After being convicted, it was hard time for Hardin, seventeen years of it in the Brown County prison, where among other occupations he studied law and headed the Sunday school. When released, he was admitted to the Texas bar and opened a law practice. During his incarceration, his wife had died, so he was free to marry, which he did to a fifteen-year-old, but the union was short-lived. So were the rest of his days.
In 1895, Hardin was practicing law in El Paso. One day, when he was standing at the bar shooting dice with a local merchant, John Selman, a man with a grievance—and who the year before had killed the appropriately named Bass Outlaw—came up behind him. Right after Hardin said, “Four sixes to beat, Henry,” Selman shot him in the head. While Hardin was on the floor, Selman shot him three more times in the chest, just to be sure. Enough hometown jurors believed Selman’s ridiculous claim of self-defense in the Hardin homicide that he was released. Selman was killed the following year by lawman George Scarborough, who in turn was killed in 1900 while pursuing outlaws in Arizona.
The other famous outlaw encounter Hickok had while marshal of Abilene? Well, “encounter” is an exaggeration. Sometime during the summer of 1871, Jesse and Frank James, accompanied by Cole Younger, came to Abilene. They may have believed that Abilene would be a good place to hide out, because that June, the trio, accompanied by Jim Cummins and Clell Miller, had robbed a bank in Iowa. The outlaws took a couple of rooms at Drovers Cottage. The James brothers were recognized by the desk clerk C. F. Gross, who probably kept it to himself. Only decades later, after Frank James had passed away, did Gross write several letters revealing the visit. It has been reported that Hickok knew of their arrival in Abilene, but the bank robbers packed up and left before being confronted by the marshal.
Overall, like in the other Kansas cow towns during the 1870s, the stiffest challenge came from drunken cowboys. Not all of them were from Texas, but enough of them were that residents in and around Abilene feared them. At times, the cowboys did not wait to get to a saloon in town to begin their mischief—they raided farmhouses for food and liquor. The farmers south of the city offered up a prayer for protection when they saw a big cloud of dust approaching from the south, signaling that a herd would soon pass by.
In his 1964 biography of Hickok, Joseph Rosa quotes from a letter sent to him that was written in 1936 by Lucile Stevens about an incident that had taken place when she was a child and her family saw that cloud of dust getting nearer. The family had been befriended by Hickok, who visited on Sunday afternoons and brought a sack of candy for the children. Stevens recalled:
The dust cloud frightened us terribly for we knew a herd was coming up the trail and the cowboys with these herds would kill any settlers they found. Usually riders were sent out from Abilene when a herd was coming, and the settlers taken to town for safety, but this time there had been no warning.
We huddled around my father and then we saw a rider coming from the north.
“Tis someone coming to meet them with whiskey,” said my father. “That finishes it.”
“What can we do?”
“Nothing. There’s no way to get away or any place to hide on this prairie. We’ll just have to take it.”
He gathered us close and we waited. Then suddenly he cried, “Children, we’re safe! I can see the rider’s long yellow hair. Tis Marshal Hickok, and they’ll not harm us now.”
Even though that summer there were a lot of cowboys and just one marshal (with all of three deputies), Hickok and his Colt pistols and his reputation held the upper hand. He was quick to act, doing what he thought was right and damn the potential repercussions. “He often took justice in his own hands, contrary to all the conception of our courts,” wrote Stewart Verckler in Cowtown Abilene. “As he was not trained as a peace officer, he saw no harm in running a man out of town, instead of locking him in the small jail. He had many enemies and many admitted they were out to get him in any possible way.”
The toughest opposition Hickok faced in Abilene came from two men who would not strictly be considered outlaws … just entrepreneurs with dicey backgrounds. Their challenge, however, turned out to be more dangerous.
On
e of the more prominent saloons in town was the Bull’s Head Tavern. It had been founded by Phil Coe and Ben Thompson, the latter still in the midst of establishing one of the more notorious reputations in the West.
Thompson was not a man destined to see old age, and there was some doubt he would survive the summer of 1871 because of his dislike of the marshal. He had been born in West Yorkshire, England, on November 2, 1843. While he was a child, the Thompson family immigrated to America, settling in Austin, Texas. As a teenager, Ben learned how to set type, and he was bent on becoming a printer. The Civil War changed those plans—two months after the attack on Fort Sumter, he enlisted in the Second Regiment, Texas Mounted Rifles, H Company, and somehow his brother, Billy, barely sixteen, managed to join the Confederate army, too. Ben was wounded during the Battle of Galveston in 1863, but he returned to his regiment, and he and Billy saw further action.
When the war ended, Ben became a mercenary, finding work fighting for Emperor Maximilian in the Mexican revolution. Along the way, he acquired a wife, whom he shipped north to Texas. When word reached him in Mexico that his wife had been attacked by her own brother, Ben returned to Texas and beat up the abuser. The injuries were so bad that Thompson was tried and convicted of attempted murder and sent to the prison known as the Huntsville Unit. His stay was a short one, though, as he received a full pardon.
Ben Thompson hit the road as a gambler, working his way up into Kansas, and was recognized for his fine clothes, mustache, and top hat. Many years later, Bat Masterson would write that Thompson “was a remarkable man in many ways and it is very doubtful if in his time there was another man living who equaled him with the pistol in a life and death struggle. The very name of Ben Thompson was enough to cause the general run of ‘man killers,’ even those who had never seen him, to seek safety in instant flight.”
Along the way, Thompson had teamed up with Philip Haddox Coe, who was, according to Theophilus Little, a citizen who would go on to be a mayor of Abilene, “as vile a character as I ever met.” The Bull’s Head Tavern & Gambling Saloon—its more elaborate full name—was their pride and joy … and a reservoir of gambling profits. Set at the outskirts of town, it was the first drinking and gaming house the trail hands encountered as they entered Abilene. Whatever business it achieved was apparently not enough for the owners, because one day, they painted a huge bull on one of the outside walls … with the bull’s anatomy depicted in graphic detail. Shocked citizens complained. Marshal Hickok ordered it removed, and Thompson refused. Instead of going for his gun, Hickok went for a can of paint and a brush and covered the bull.
As tough as he reportedly was, Thompson was not about to go up against the legendary man-killer himself. (He later told a friend about Hickok that he “had two hells in his eyes.”) Instead, Thompson tried to convince John Wesley Hardin to do it, by telling him tall tales about Hickok’s hatred of Texans. The teenager really didn’t care and by now considered the marshal something of an idol. Finally, Hardin had enough of Thompson’s talk.
“I am not doing anybody’s fighting just now except my own, but I know how to stick to a friend,” he said. “If Bill needs killing, why don’t you kill him yourself?” Thompson demurred, increasing his life expectancy.
Neither was Coe about to try to outdraw Hickok, even though by the time of his residing in Abilene, Coe had acquired a reputation as a gunfighter. Born in July 1839 in Gonzales, Texas, he joined the Confederate army the first year of the war, and when he left in April 1863, he was a member of the Thirty-Sixth Texas Cavalry. He wandered south into Mexico, and it is believed it was there he hooked up with Ben Thompson, with both men being mercenaries for the embattled emperor, who was executed in June 1867.
Over time, Coe worked his way back north, through Texas and then up into Kansas, living and gambling in Salina in 1870. He arrived in Abilene a month after Hickok did, reuniting with Thompson. He had gotten to be friends with John Wesley Hardin, so Coe also suggested that Hardin show in the most emphatic way that the teenager could whip the thirty-four-year-old marshal in a fair gunfight. Again, Hardin was not so inclined.
When the two owners of the Bull’s Head did not paint another bull, or any other animal, on the side of their saloon, word spread that Hickok had intimidated them into submission. Hearing the gossip, an enraged Coe confronted the marshal and declared that he, too, was a stone-cold shootist and “I could kill a crow on the wing.” Hickok coolly gazed at him, then queried, “Did the crow have a pistol? Was he shooting back? I will be.”
Several accounts suggest that what escalated the tension between Coe and Hickok beyond Wild Bill’s having emasculated the Bull’s Head wall was that they were seeing the same girl. In a typical Kansas cow town like Abilene where the men far outnumbered the women, rivalries were common. Jameson even identified her as “a dance hall girl named Jessie Hasel.”
This was not uncommon for Hickok. Domestic bliss for any length of time was not his style. Henry Jameson reported that he “always had a mistress in every town. One of his favorites in Abilene was supposed to have been an Indian girl whom he kept in a nice little cottage on the outskirts of town.”
Whether or not this was true—she could have been another one of his “Indian Annies”—Hickok enjoyed consorting with several women while in Abilene. However, it was at this time in Abilene that his love life took a dramatic turn—when the circus came to town.
Chapter Fourteen
A THREE-RING ROMANCE
The Hippo-Olympiad and Mammoth Circus was the grand name of the production that arrived in Abilene during the summer of 1871. It was owned and operated by a pioneer in the male-dominated industry, Agnes Thatcher Lake. She had one of the most remarkable lives of any nineteenth-century American woman—which included being the love of Wild Bill Hickok’s life. This fact has been overshadowed by the notoriety of Calamity Jane and the fabrications about her “romance” with Hickok, robbing Mrs. Lake of some of the spotlight she deserves in American history.
Maria Agnes Pohlschneider was born on August 24, 1826, in what is now northwestern Germany. She was the ninth child of her parents, Friedrich and Catharina, who were farmers. When Agnes was six, she and her father, by then a widower, and three of his sons sailed to the United States. They were at the forefront of a robust German migration, which saw close to two hundred thousand citizens of that country look for a new life in America between 1833 and 1843. They landed in Baltimore and traveled west to settle near Cincinnati because that city had become a haven for German immigrants. The father would soon be known as Frederick Mersman, having Americanized his first name and adopted a version of his original last name.
Agnes actually lived out the fantasy some children have of running away to join the circus. This was not what Frederick Mersman had in mind for the only daughter under his care. The expectation, when she was turning sixteen, was that Agnes would settle down with a German-born merchant and raise children in some comfort in Cincinnati. In fact, a grocer had already been selected for her. But then the circus came to town, and with it was a performer billed as Bill Lake.
William Lake Thatcher had joined the Mammoth Circus & Gymnastic Arena Company when he was seventeen. Listed as “Master Thatcher,” he performed horse-riding tricks. He also worked as a juggler and a clown, and he had a dog act. He was adept at putting up and taking down the huge white tents and driving wagons. Whatever it took to make a living in the circus business, Master Thatcher could do it, and any production was glad to have him. By the spring of 1846, when Agnes was nineteen and the Great Western Circus arrived, it was the thirty-year-old Bill Lake she saw perform.
Agnes was so smitten that she immediately ran off with Bill, which both appalled and frightened the Mersman family. A clown was perhaps the last person her father and brothers thought she would marry, and they knew something of what a rough, itinerant existence circus life was. Undeterred, Agnes and Bill were married in Louisiana, and she began her career as a performer, one that would include becoming a circus
legend and pioneer and having a daughter who became an international star.
For the first year after their marriage, Bill taught Agnes the circus life, which entailed not only performing a variety of acts but doing everything involved with setting up and breaking down and moving such a complicated operation. Then in 1847, she made her debut as an equestrian and singer with the Rockwell & Company’s New York Circus. The following year, the couple were in Cincinnati, where Agnes was reunited with her family and she performed a slack-wire routine, though she was pregnant. She gave birth to a stillborn baby, but this did not stop her return to the rings. In January 1849, in New Orleans, Agnes gave birth to a boy. Alas, the city was deep into a cholera epidemic—the baby contracted it and died at only twelve days old. The couple continued to thrive professionally, at least, with Bill gaining fame as a clown and Agnes as an equestrian. And finally, they had children.
In 1858, the couple adopted a seven-year-old, Alice, and around the same time another young girl, Emma, joined the family. Both were already or soon to become performers, Alice as an equestrian and Emma as a dancer playing the hornpipe. Several years later, Agnes and Bill adopted William Dale, the seven-year-old son of another circus performer who had passed away. Billed as Little Willie, he became a rider with the circus, too. And during these years, the Lakes had become popular enough performers and had saved sufficient funds that they could own their own circus company.
Actually, with various partners—including for a time James Anthony Bailey, who would later team up with P. T. Barnum to form the world’s most famous circus—the Lakes owned several companies, with a few simply going out of business during the difficult Civil War years when large swaths of the South and Mid-Atlantic states were off-limits. They persevered, however, with Bill Lake being both a clown and an animal trainer and Agnes doing just about everything else. During one stop in December 1864, troops under General George Thomas arrived at the circus and confiscated all its horses to be used in an attack on the Confederate forces of General John Bell Hood—thus, the pampered four-legged performers overnight became cannon fodder.