Dodge City

by Clavin, Tom

  For the next several years, Allison was involved in more violent incidents, including men getting killed, but he always escaped punishment. And then he changed. In 1881, soon before turning forty, Allison married Dora McCulloch, the sister of a sister-in-law. Their first daughter was born in 1885. Two years later Dora was pregnant with their second daughter and the ranching and farming family was living peacefully in Pecos, Texas. Driving a wagon on July 3, Allison was going too fast approaching a draw, and while trying to halt his horses he was flung from the wagon and died of a broken neck—the same neck that many a time had escaped the hangman’s noose.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Of the many Indian raids in Kansas, none was ever characterized with such brutal and ferocious crimes, and none ever excited such horror and indignation as the Cheyenne raid of 1878.

  —CLARA HAZELRIGG, A New History of Kansas

  By September 1878, the edge of the frontier had moved west and south of Dodge City and the last of the Indian tribes had been forced into exile in South Dakota or in Oklahoma / Indian Territory. In South Dakota, Red Cloud had transitioned from war general to semiretired statesman; Sitting Bull had fled to Canada rather than face the army units seeking to avenge the Little Bighorn disaster; and Crazy Horse had been murdered the year before at Fort Robinson in Nebraska. Dodge City, continuing its evolution from a wicked city to a somewhat cosmopolitan one, had no time or patience for an old-fashioned Indian attack.

  But when Dull Knife came calling, women and children quaked under their beds, and even timid dry-goods clerks stuck pistols in their belts.

  Dull Knife—also known as Morning Star—was sixty-eight, well past the life span of a man in 1878, especially an Indian, yet he was still an active and very respected leader of the Northern Cheyenne. He had led warriors in the Cheyenne-Arapaho War in Colorado during the last two years of the Civil War; had joined the Lakota Sioux in the battles in Wyoming in 1866–1868 known as Red Cloud’s War, which had included wiping out Captain William Fetterman’s entire command; and had been part of the coalition formed by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse that had sent Colonel George Armstrong Custer to his doom in 1876.

  It was a devastating defeat for Dull Knife in November 1876, five months after Little Bighorn, when a vengeful General George Crook, thrashing about the High Plains to kill or capture Crazy Horse, found Dull Knife’s camp on the Powder River in Wyoming. The attack decimated the Cheyenne there, and the survivors, with winter taking hold, fled with what little they could carry. Before they reached a welcoming band of Sioux, eleven children died of exposure and starvation, despite the Cheyenne having killed and eaten almost all their horses during the journey. Dull Knife and his followers barely survived the winter, and in the spring of 1877 they surrendered to the army.

  The Northern Cheyenne were forced to join other tribes and bands on reservations in Indian Territory. Among the trials and tribulations they endured that year were hunger from an inadequate amount of buffalo and deer to hunt and various illnesses including malaria. Repeated requests by Dull Knife and another Indian leader, Little Wolf, to be allowed to return to their hunting grounds in Montana were rejected. When conditions did not improve by September 1878, the two leaders with three hundred followers left the reservation and began the trek to their home one thousand miles away. They had to get through Kansas first.

  As settlements in southwest Kansas were attacked by Indians foraging for food, word spread like a prairie fire. On the seventeenth, several cattle camps near Fort Dodge were attacked, with men killed and cows butchered. Word also spread that a mail carrier had been slain and two ranches, both less than twenty miles from Dodge City, had been attacked and robbed of horses, food, and weapons. This was close enough that people boarded up their houses. Loaded rifles and shotguns were kept right behind the doors and windows. The proximity of Fort Dodge was of less comfort than predicted when it turned out that the entire complement posted there consisted of nineteen Bluebellies. Reportedly, reinforcements from Fort Leavenworth were on the way, but the large force of Cheyenne—and with every hair-raising report, the force grew larger—could attack a defenseless Dodge City at any moment.

  Fanning fears were the breathless accounts in the Dodge City Times, such as “news brought almost hourly of murder and depredations by the straggling bands of Northern Cheyenne,” and that messengers arrived from the prairie “bringing accounts of the Cheyenne murder and stealing.” Citizens were thrown “into the wildest tremor when it was reported that the Indians were seen within a few miles of the city.”

  Wyatt Earp was one of a group of men dispatched to a homestead four miles to the west to put out a blaze believed to have been started by the marauding members of Dull Knife and Little Wolf’s band. Patrolling Ford County, Bat Masterson was reminded of his confrontations with Indians during his and Ed’s buffalo-hunting days. He would prefer not to repeat them now.

  As the crisis escalated, Wyatt became the one in charge of the civilian guardians of the city. As luck would have it, Bat and Charlie Bassett took on the task of accompanying Robert Wright and other Dodge City businessmen on a trip to Kansas City. Bill Tilghman and John Joshua Webb were not on the city or county police force then, but they volunteered to man the barricades; plans were in place to block the entrances to the city at the first sign of a so-called savage. In addition, to protect the townsfolk, trail bosses sent some of their Texans to Dodge City to stand with Wyatt, Jim Masterson, and the other peace officers as armed guards. Even Doc Holliday brandished a shotgun between hands of poker.

  But the Northern Cheyenne bypassed these defenses by moving away from Dodge City, intent on their goal of Montana. The army was in hot pursuit. On September 27, at a place that would come to be called Battle Canyon, on Punished Woman’s Fork in Scott County, the Indians were caught by an expanded contingent of troops from Fort Dodge under the command of Lieutenant Colonel William Lewis. The Indians realized that if they could not outrun the soldiers, they had no choice but to turn and fight. Dull Knife, Little Wolf, and their warriors hid the women, children, and elderly in a cave and then went out to meet the Bluebellies.

  It was a victory of sorts, in that during the battle Colonel Lewis was wounded and his troops were daunted by the desperation of the Indians’ fighting. (Lewis would become the last military man to die in Kansas in a battle with Indians.) The Cheyenne kept pushing on, but more skirmishes resulted in more casualties. New army and mobilized civilian units appeared, like wolves attacking a wounded buffalo. Finally, after traveling through Kansas into Nebraska, the Indians under Dull Knife once more surrendered. The threat to the frontier towns ended.

  Though there are several conflicting accounts, it appears that the Cheyenne uprising in September produced an incident that further cemented the friendship between Wyatt and Doc. While Dull Knife’s band was in the area and tales abounded of plundered homesteads, fifty-five head of cattle belonging to the ranch owned by the brothers Tobe and Bud Driskill and Ed Morrison were taken. Either for the adventure or the reward offered, Doc joined the ranch owners, several ranch hands, and cavalry commanded by Captain William Hemphill to catch the thieving Indians.

  On the eighteenth, there was a skirmish between the searchers and Northern Cheyenne, and some of the cows were recaptured. All returned to Dodge City to resupply for what could be a longer follow-up chase. The next day, filled with too much as-yet-unspent adrenaline, the civilians and soldiers began to fight each other. Guns were drawn, and one soldier was shot in the leg. Doc had no interest in such doings and was seated inside of a saloon at a monte table.

  However, he became more attentive to events in the street when Wyatt and other peace officers arrived to quiet the would-be cattle rescuers. They were having a tough time of it, and from the other side of the window Doc could see more guns being jerked out of their holsters. A man named Frank Loving was the monte dealer (we’ll soon hear more about him), and Doc asked him for a gun. Loving produced one from under the table. Doc came out of the saloon
with that gun and the one he kept tucked behind him for emergencies.

  As Wyatt recalled it, after Doc emerged, he stood on the sidewalk “and throwing both guns down on the crowd, said, ‘Throw up your hands!’ This rather startled them and diverted their attention. In an instant I had drawn my gun, and the arrest of the crowd followed. They were confined in jail overnight.” Doc returned to the monte table, perhaps thinking this lawing stuff was not all that difficult to do if one timed his entrance and exit just right.

  With the Indian threat gone, it was time to return to the usual chores of jailing bad guys. Soon, a tragic event would involve the cream of the local lawmen. Wyatt, Bat, Bassett, and Tilghman would ride together to capture the killer of Dora Hand.

  In October, the seasonal rowdiness of the trail-driving cowboys was beginning to wind down. A new prairie season was taking hold, with cooler breezes being more prominent than long sun-baked days, and autumn rains began to refill streams and watering holes. The cattle drives that had begun in Texas were soon to finish up for the year. Only the most drunken or foolish required accommodations in the calaboose. Sheriff Masterson and Marshal Bassett and their deputies could lounge in tilted-back wooden chairs outside their respective offices and contemplate with more confidence getting through another night without any trouble.

  So the shooting in the early-morning hours of the fourth was indeed a surprise. More surprising was that the victim was a woman and that the crime involved Mayor Dog Kelley.

  Dora Hand was a popular performer in Dodge City, singing and dancing in musical comedies on Ham Bell’s stage and at the Theatre Comique and Lady Gay Dance Hall. Most audience members knew her as Fannie Keenan, her stage name. The scant information known about her is that she had been born in Boston thirty-four years earlier, her family had the ability to send her to Europe to study music, and she had been an aspiring opera singer in New York City. She had ended up on the frontier because she was fleeing her husband, an East Coast musician named Ted Hand. Another story claimed that, like Doc Holliday, she had headed west looking for a climate that would slow the progression of tuberculosis.

  As Fannie Keenan, Dora had arrived earlier in the year with a friend and fellow performer, Fannie Garretson, who was already experienced in the ways of cow towns. In the expanding entertainment scene that was Dodge City, the two Fannies easily found steady work, at forty dollars a week. An article written at the time described Dora as being “of medium height and build, with a face of classic beauty. There was a grace and charm in her walk. She dressed plainly, usually in black, and this color seemed to accentuate the ivory whiteness of her soft skin.”

  Quickly, her popularity began to rival that of Eddie Foy earlier in the summer. Dora also acquired the reputation of kindness, especially toward the less fortunate in Dodge City. Several accounts have her bringing food to families and distributing candy to children “white, black or Mexican.” She even would give money to broke cowboys so they could get back the saddles they lost in poker games to begin to ride back to their outfits and earn more wages.

  No doubt quite a few men developed romantic feelings for Dora, but the one who counted most was the mayor. He squired her to dinners and shows at other theaters, and more important, at the summer’s end Kelley arranged for the Alhambra on the north side of Front Street to hire her to sing and dance five nights a week for seventy-five dollars, which most likely made Dora Hand the highest-paid performer in Dodge City that autumn. Some of the most elite women in city society were critical when they heard about her visiting a small house owned by the married mayor off of Front Street, behind the Great Western Hotel that looked out on the Arkansas River.

  Though at least ten years younger than she was, James Kenedy, whom most people called Spike, fell hard for Dora. He was a half-Mexican and half-white son of a wealthy Texan. His father was Mifflin Kenedy, a Pennsylvanian who had traded in captaining a ship for heading west to become a rancher. He had hit the jackpot by being partners in the King Ranch, one of the largest in Texas, and then in 1868 had bought his own 172,000-acre spread near Corpus Christi. Kenedy regularly sent herds up the trail to Dodge City and was well known there. Spike’s mother was Petra Vela de Vidal, the daughter of a Mexican provincial governor who had borne twelve children, six to a colonel in the Mexican Army and six to Kenedy.

  To Spike, being the son of Texas privilege meant getting away with everything up to murder. He felt more at home in cow-town saloons and with the women who worked there than at his father’s Laureles Ranch in South Texas. When too much revelry got him into trouble, either his father bailed him out or the local law cut him loose rather than risk the wrath of Mifflin Kenedy. For example, in one of his earliest escapades, in 1872, Spike had shot and wounded a man in Ellsworth, and that night he was allowed to flee the jail. Occasionally, Spike was chastised enough that he paid some dues as a ranch hand and trail rider, but Dodge City emitted a siren call that literally got him off the wagon. His escalating love for Dora Hand had him spending more time in town. That it was unrequited led to more bad behavior.

  Late in July, Wyatt had found Kenedy walking down the street north of the Dead Line carrying a six-shooter. When the younger man refused the request to turn over the gun, he discovered the definition of buffaloing. The fine Kenedy had to pay in court probably didn’t help his headache. But three weeks later he was back in court, brought there this time by Charlie Bassett, for disorderly conduct.

  Predictably, Spike’s antics were most often on display at the Alhambra, where he drank up Dora’s stage charms along with the whiskey. He was very jealous of Dog Kelley, yet it was the mayor whom Spike approached to complain about the discipline doled out by Wyatt and Bassett. Kelley told the young man sternly that he would become increasingly familiar with the inside of the jailhouse if he didn’t straighten out. Instead of heeding this advice, Spike attacked. Kelley was an experienced-enough frontier man that he knew how to handle himself. When he was finished spanking Spike about the face, the mayor dragged the lovelorn young man outside and dumped him in the street.

  Though made of stern stuff, an intestinal ailment was what saved Dog Kelley’s life. For weeks, a humiliated Spike Kenedy fine-tuned his plot to kill the mayor. He wouldn’t make the mistake again of confronting Kelley; this time he would sneak up on him, kill him, and get clean away. Even if it got messy, no court would actually convict Mifflin Kenedy’s second-oldest son of a serious offense. He stalked the mayor and realized the best opportunity would be when Kelley, instead of going home late at night, decided to stay at his cottage behind Front Street, which he did many nights. Spike’s strategy became more sophisticated when he purchased a racehorse and was confident no lawman could run him down.

  So it was at 4:30 on the morning of October 4 that Spike rode through the quiet streets of Dodge City, past the closed doors and drawn shades, and trotted behind the Great Western and up to the cabin. He knew which room Kelley slept in, and he fired two shots into it from a .44-caliber pistol.

  However, the mayor was not inside. He was at Fort Dodge. After a few days of persistent abdominal pain, Kelley had gone to visit the army surgeon and would return the next day. He had offered use of the cabin to the two Fannies.

  The first bullet entered the room but lodged harmlessly in one wall. The second bullet hit one of the sleeping women in the side, killing her. Responding to the shots, assistant marshals Wyatt Earp and Jim Masterson found a hysterical Fannie Garretson and a dead Dora Hand.

  The crowd that convened at the marshal’s office that morning had no other suspect in mind but Spike Kenedy, especially after a bartender, who had just closed up a nearby saloon, reported seeing the young Texan galloping away from the Great Western. Certain that he had fled well beyond the confines of Dodge City, Bat Masterson, as Ford County sheriff, chose to lead the posse. Riding out of town with him that afternoon were Wyatt, Charlie Bassett, Bill Duffey, and Bill Tilghman. If they couldn’t get their man, no one could—even if it meant taking on Texans who worked f
or Spike’s father.

  Spike may not have known much about Bat, especially that he was an aggressive and relentless pursuer. He probably relished the fact that he had a ten-hour start on the posse on a horse that could not be caught. Relentlessly, though, the posse thundered south toward the Texas border. A powerful rainstorm following a bout of stinging hail did not slow them down.

  The nasty weather had affected Spike and his more sensitive horse, however, so much so that thirty-five miles southwest of Dodge the following day, the killer came over a rise to find the five lawmen blocking the trail: they had ridden past him during the night. Well, this wouldn’t do at all; Spike’s only plan was to get to the safety of the Laureles Ranch, which required that his horse outride the posse.

  He did not get far. As soon as his horse turned in the other direction, both Bat and Wyatt fired. The bullet from Bat’s .50-caliber rifle struck Spike in the shoulder as Wyatt’s pistol shot hit the horse. It could not outrace a bullet, and it died. As it did so, it fell on its wounded rider.

  After Bat dismounted and began yanking Spike free, he was asked, “Did I kill him?” The sheriff told him he had killed Dora Hand instead. A distraught Spike complained to Bat, “You ought to have made a better shot than you did!” Bat tugged Spike harder and responded, “Well, you damn murdering son of a bitch, I did the best I could.”

  About thirty hours after the murder, the suspect was in the Dodge City jail. Bassett, Wyatt, and Jim Masterson were on guard duty—not to prevent Spike’s escape, but to dissuade the angry mob of citizens outside from trying to break him out and lynch him. The trial would take place in two weeks, presided over by Judge R. G. Cook. Before then, Dora Hand was buried. For the second time that year there was a big public funeral in Dodge City. Shops and saloons closed that day, and over four hundred people attended, including poor families who had experienced the performer’s generosity.