by Clavin, Tom
There were still colorful characters who passed through, though. Abel Head “Shanghai” Pierce, for example, was one of the most successful cattlemen of the era. After a stint as a butcher in the Confederate Army, he wound up owning a ranch on Matagorda Bay in Texas (though he hailed from, of all places, Rhode Island). He and his nephew introduced the American Brahman breed of cattle, which were immune to tick fever. At six feet five, Pierce was especially tall for the time, and he carried 220 pounds. He sported a white beard and a voice that people claimed could be heard half a mile away. He called his cattle sea lions, contending they had been bred in the bay, and in the 1870s he sold tens of thousands of them in the Kansas cow towns. In 1875, Wichita was a favorite watering hole, and he enjoyed raising hell there.
One night in a saloon, Pierce was drunk and wearing a gun, an ominous combination. Wyatt walked in and ordered the cattleman to leave town and not return until he was sober. Pierce obeyed, but his unhappiness must have been more than evident back at camp, because soon after, twenty or so of his cowboys rode into Wichita demanding to see Wyatt. He presented himself, and a loaded shotgun, and Wyatt must have been accompanied by others, because the reported outcome was that all twenty were disarmed, escorted to jail, and fined. (This may have been the only time that James Earp stood shoulder-to-shoulder with his brother and holding a gun.) The next morning, a rueful Shanghai Pierce, twirling a walking cane, arrived at the jail and paid to bail his cowboys out to the tune of two thousand dollars.
Such extravagances were not unusual for the charismatic cattleman. A few years later Pierce paid ten thousand dollars for a twenty-foot-tall bronze statue of himself. It now overlooks his grave in Blessing, Texas.
Wyatt must have kept his nose clean and done a good job, because there were several additional mentions of doing his duty and keeping the peace in the Wichita newspaper. The December 15, 1875, issue of The Beacon tells of Wyatt finding a man so drunk he was just lying in the street. “He took him to the ‘cooler’ and on searching him found in the neighborhood of $500 on his person.” The drunk slept it off in the city jail, and, as the newspaper reported, when he faced a judge the next morning, he could pay his fine from the bankroll Wyatt had returned to him.
Sarah Earp may have questioned Wyatt’s integrity and found it wanting, because she apparently left town. Perhaps Wyatt and Mattie, now the sole Mrs. Earp, would have remained where they were for years to come. But the end for Wyatt in Wichita was the 1876 election, in April. This time Bill Smith hoped to unseat Meagher. He watched the counting of votes on election day while nursing some bad bruises.
During the heated campaign, Smith had accused Meagher of having a plan to pack the police department with Earps, meaning Morgan and James or Virgil would be appointed to serve alongside Wyatt, and the citizens of the city would have to foot the bill for these extra and unnecessary officers. Wyatt was furious that his family was being used in this way. The next time he encountered Smith on the street, Wyatt gave him a good beating and was arrested for disturbing the peace. Reluctantly, Meagher had to follow the wishes of the city council and fire Wyatt for conduct unbecoming an officer.
Meagher prevailed in the election. He wanted to rehire Wyatt, but the city council vote on the matter was a tie. Feeling betrayed by them, Wyatt considered his options, and instead of requesting a new vote, he and Mattie began packing. James and Bessie had established a brothel elsewhere in Kansas. In May, Wyatt and his wife set out for Dodge City.
There, he would renew his friendship with Bat Masterson, and together they would clean up the “wickedest town in the West.”
ACT II
Wyatt Earp as a young man.
(COURTESY OF DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY)
NINE
Of course everyone has heard of wicked Dodge; but a great deal has been said and written about it that is not true. Its good side has never been told. Many reckless, bad men came to Dodge and many brave men. These had to be met by officers equally brave and reckless. As the old saying goes, “You must fight the devil with fire.”
—ROBERT WRIGHT
Many of the myths about the Wild West are connected in some way to Dodge City. During what some writers and public relations practitioners have labeled the “golden decade” of Dodge City, that being the years from 1872 to 1882, some of the frontier’s most famous and infamous characters passed through. Quite a few of the stories about people and events evolved into myths or began their lives as tall tales. Thankfully, some of them are true or at least contain a solid kernel of truth.
Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson, of course, were two of those famous characters, and shortly we’ll pick up where we left off with them. Doc Holliday will be along soon enough. There was Wild Bill Hickok, until he was shot in the back in Deadwood, South Dakota. We’ll visit again with Ben and Billy Thompson. The actions of that decade in the American West, related to Dodge City one way or another, made or enhanced the reputations of many a gunfighter, whether he be a lawman or an outlaw.
The word “gunfighter” in America can be traced back to 1874, but it wasn’t until around 1900 that it was more commonly used. The term that most people used in the 1870s was “shootist,” or the more specific “man killer.” An example of one was John Wesley Hardin.
Hardin spent some time in Dodge City, but he was more associated with Texas and another Kansas city, Abilene, where he had been photographed before escaping the long gun of Wild Bill. By then, the son of a Methodist preacher was already a veteran man killer. In 1867, his precocious criminal career had begun at age fourteen, 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. A few were killed while he worked as a cowboy on the Chisholm Trail; there was that one man dispatched in the hotel in Abilene; and he had a run-in with some lawmen in Texas. But then he seemed to go straight, marrying a Texas girl in Gonzales County, and they had three children.
But for Hardin, domestic bliss didn’t last. A killing spree ended the lives of four men, and he was arrested in Cherokee County by the sheriff. He escaped from jail, fled to Brown County, where he killed a deputy sheriff, and, after collecting his wife and kids, he went east, to Florida. It wasn’t until 1877 that Hardin was located and arrested, in Pensacola by Texas Rangers. 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 Ranger John Armstrong, who shot Mann in the chest, killing him.
After being convicted it was hard time for Hardin, seventeen years of it in the state prison in Huntsville, 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 in El Paso to testify in a murder trial. One day 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 killing Hardin that he was released. He was slain the following year by lawman George Scarborough, who in turn was killed in 1900 while pursuing outlaws in Arizona.
Jesse James passed through Dodge City from time to time, and he certainly enhanced the reputation of th
e entire frontier as a place where legendary gunmen came to live and die. Born in Missouri, he was only seventeen when he joined Quantrill’s Raiders in 1864, riding alongside the likes of Bloody Bill Anderson as they made Kansas bleed, following up on a massacre in Lawrence the previous year that killed 150 people. In the early 1870s, Jesse, too, was glad to see the railroads expanding westward because that meant more targets that he and his brother Frank and the Younger brothers could rob.
What can be gently labeled an “innovation” by Jesse was being an early prairie practitioner of public relations. He did this by creating a press release about himself and his gang in advance of robbing a train in 1874. The train was in Gads Hill, Missouri, and the robbery resulted in a good haul of cash and jewelry. Before leaving the train, Jesse handed the conductor a written message and told him to have it telegraphed to the St. Louis Dispatch. The “press release” was titled “The Most Daring Train Robbery on Record!” It described what had just taken place, and ended, “They were all mounted on handsome horses. There is a hell of an excitement in this part of the country.”
A bank was the gang’s downfall, the First National Bank in Northfield, Minnesota. The attempt to rob it in September 1876 was a disaster, with brothers Jesse and Frank James barely escaping and Cole, Bob, and Jim Younger captured. (When Cole was finally paroled twenty-five years later, he and Frank James entertained audiences with a Wild West show.) Jesse and Frank went on the run, with sightings reported all over the frontier.
What most of the men who came to Dodge City in the 1870s had in common were horses and guns. Few feared the former, but the latter could cause a lot of harm. Cowboys carried sidearms, as did the lawmen, who also often shouldered shotguns when making their rounds. The weapon found in many holsters was the Colt revolver.
Samuel Colt’s fascination with guns began when he was a child in Hartford, Connecticut, and his maternal grandfather, a former officer in the Continental Army, bequeathed to him his flintlock pistol. In 1830, at the age of sixteen, Colt went to sea on a brig bound for Calcutta. It was on this voyage that he observed that the spokes in the ship’s wheel, no matter the direction it was spun, always synchronized with a clutch to hold the wheel in place.
Colt was familiar with the multibarreled, if cumbersome, handgun called a “pepperbox revolver,” which required the shooter to rotate the gun’s cylinder, like a pepper grinder, after each discharge. He became transfixed with the idea of eliminating that time-wasting step. Using scraps from the ship’s store, he built a wooden model of a five-shot revolver based on the movement of the brig’s wheel, wherein the cocked hammer would rotate the cylinder, and a pawl would lock it in place on the tooth of a circular gear.
Back in the United States two years later, Colt secured American and European patents on his invention, founded the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company in Paterson, New Jersey, and set about raising funds. He was spectacularly inept. He toured the eastern United States and Canada with what can only be described as a carnival act that incorporated nitrous oxide, wax sculptures, and fireworks in his demonstrations. He gave theatrical speeches and threw elaborate dinner parties awash in alcohol, to which he invited wealthy businessmen and military officers in hopes of luring investors and securing army contracts. The problem was, Colt usually ended up outdrinking them all. His sales did spike briefly when the army ordered a consignment of five-shot Paterson Colts during the Second Seminole War. It was not enough. In 1842 the assets of the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company were sold at public auction in New York City.
Colt tried his hand at other inventions—underwater electrical detonators and, in partnership with Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph, a cable waterproofing company to run undersea communication lines. Then Colt returned to his revolver. At about the same time he was tinkering with its original design, and had even scraped together the money to hire a New York gunsmith to begin limited production, lightning struck when a veteran of the Seminole War knocked on his door with an order for one thousand guns. The man’s name was Samuel Walker, and he had recently been promoted to captain in the Texas Rangers. Walker’s Ranger company had used the five-shot Colt to great success against marauding Comanche Indians, and he proposed adding a sixth round to the cylinder. Their collaboration produced the Walker Colt, the template for a generation of western handguns.
President James Polk approved succeeding editions of Colt’s handgun, most famously the Navy Revolver, as the official sidearm of the U.S. Army. It would be said after the Civil War that “Abe Lincoln may have freed all men, but Sam Colt made them equal.” By then, however, Walker was long dead—killed in a skirmish during the Mexican War in 1847—and the fifty-seven-year-old Colt, wealthy beyond description, had only five more years to live before he, too, died, of gout. But his gun lived as the six-shooter that participated in many a confrontation across the American West.
Especially in Dodge City. That fifteen men would be gunned down there in a year beginning in the summer of 1872 surely did not indicate that a golden decade had begun, unless it was for the undertaker. However, the outbreak of violence should have surprised no one. Business was booming in Dodge City. “And such a business!” exclaimed Robert Wright, reminiscing in an article written five years later. “Dozens of cars a day were loaded with hides and meat and getting supplies from early morning to late at night.”
Being on the edge of the buffalo hunting grounds and connected to the big cities back east and to the north meant that hides were shipped as soon as they were hauled in. When the hunters, many of them retaining the foul odors and wretched stains of their gory work, were in town, they wanted whiskey and women. Good manners would only result in them having to wait longer for both.
The hunters’ work remained hard and dangerous, and not just in the summer. The winter of 1872–1873 was an especially harsh one for those men camped or traveling out on the prairie. In December, as Wright and a group of teamsters he had hired were hauling twenty wagons loaded with corn to Fort Dodge, they were hit with a blizzard. After two days, it was still raging. To stay alive in their makeshift shelters, the men had begun to burn the wagons. Finally, two men set off on mules for the fort. Almost immediately they became lost in the blinding snow. However, the mules found their way to Fort Dodge. The two men arrived frozen in their saddles, but alive. They told about the stranded party, and Wright and the others were rescued. During the entire winter the surgeon at the fort amputated the frostbitten arms or legs of seventy hunters, and Colonel Richard Dodge estimated that as many as a hundred men froze to death.
Like the hunters, when the cowboys came to Dodge City, they wanted their entertainments, too. Filled with energy and pockets filled with their pay, they enjoyed riding down Front Street firing their pistols, sending citizens diving under their beds, and shopkeepers behind their wooden counters. It had been a long, dusty journey guiding thousands of cows to the cattle pens adjacent to the Dodge City railroad station, and the drovers’ thirst and appetites had to be satisfied without delay. No one, not even a lawman, was to get in their way.
Prospectors, new settlers, would-be settlers heading farther west, men on the run from some trouble back east, and outlaws looking for more trouble were in Dodge City, too. Violent urges percolated in the kind of melting pot that the former Buffalo City had become. In his colorful memoir Our Wild Indians, Colonel Dodge considered such men “the most reckless of all the reckless desperadoes developed on the frontier” and “the terror of all who come near” them. Their arrival in town was “regarded as a calamity second only to a western tornado.”
A few of these reckless desperadoes did not leave town alive. North of the city was a treeless bluff that became one of the most notorious sites in the West. One night, two cowboys were camping up on that bluff and a quarrel began. It escalated to the point that one of the cowboys drew his gun and shot the other one. The killer hurried down the slope to his horse and rode away. The body he left behind was discovered the next morning. No one knew what else t
o do with the anonymous cowboy, so a grave was dug there and he was dropped in it with his boots on. The grassy knoll became known as Boot Hill.
It became the final resting place of those who didn’t pull the trigger fast enough. And occasionally, an odd place to find humor. On the marker of a man who had been shot dead had been carved, DIED OF LEAD POISONING.
In the face of all this rampant incivility, many of the citizens of Dodge City were trying to construct a civilization. The railroad had officially arrived that late summer of 1872, when a locomotive hauling banana-yellow cars chugged into town. The line carried in people looking for a fresh start and carried the buffalo hides and cattle out. The downtown area was growing. Tents had been replaced by wooden buildings that contained, in addition to the rapidly multiplying saloons, grocery stores, a barbershop, a gunsmith and a blacksmith, a drugstore, and dry-goods stores.
In November, a visiting reporter from a newspaper in Leavenworth counted between sixty and seventy buildings. Front Street and Bridge Street constituted the main intersection. The unpaved streets allowed for dust storms to kick up when the hot winds blew from the south, and during rainstorms horses, wagons, and pedestrians sank into the slick mud. Merchants banded together to construct wooden sidewalks on Front Street that were eight feet wide, and when there was enough mud, foot-wide planks were extended from one side of the street to the other.
Visitors to the city had two choices for accommodations. One was the Dodge House and its thirty-eight rooms. It had been the hotel J. M. Essington owned until his cook killed him. The other was the Great Western Hotel. One advantage was that the latter hotel had wild game on its menu, but a disadvantage for thirsty travelers was that no alcohol was allowed. There soon would be a building that served as a church for several denominations, a schoolhouse, a boot shop, a butcher shop, a courthouse, and restaurants such as Delmonico’s; and two newspaper offices, one each for the Dodge City Times and the Ford County Globe, would open within the next few years.