by Mari Sandoz
With the gun still hot in his hand, Phil Coe admitted he did. "I shot at a dog."
Hickok drew his pistols and Coe fired, too. Still the poor shot, his bullet went through the marshal's coat while he caught one in the belly, jerking back a little before the impact. He fired again and missed, the men around him falling back from the poor marksmanship, their guns out. Williams, one of Hickok's assistants, came running around the dark corner to help. Bill saw him, fired twice, and killed him instantly.
Some thought that perhaps the stories of Hickok's eye troubles were true, or maybe he was nervous, with the Texans around him, and fired at Williams more by shadow than by sight. But the instant he knew what he had done he gathered up the body, carried it into the saloon, sobbing over it.
With Coe mortally wounded, and the wide Kansas prairies still full of gun-toting cowboys from below the Red River, no matter how deserted Abilene might be, everybody involved scattered and nobody remembered that the outlines of the bull, the ostensible excuse for all the trouble, were still very plain, and unnoticed.
Hickok left town in a hurry. Some said he headed East to a doctor about his eyes. Topeka, or maybe Kansas City. Others, knowing the Thompson brothers, the Hard Case relatives of Coe, and the chute run of Texans who had seen young Wesley Hardin make small of Wild Bill by taking his guns, were certain Hickok left for his health all right.
Shanghai Pierce listened to all the stories and roared out loud enough to be heard down at the crossing of the Red when he saw the painting of the bull. He stalked unarmed, as always, through the empty streets and ordered his herds coming up the trail turned off to Ellsworth, far to the southwest.
Not even McCoy, father of Abilene, could hold the Texans now. By fall blue asters and shining goldenrod had grown up along the breaks where everything had been tromped into the ground for four years. Late geese settled down within the sound of a pistol shot of Abilene, if there had been one to disturb their night.
The town council terminated all Hickok's official connections with Abilene and early in 1872 a group of farmers and citizens of the town sent word asking the cattlemen not to return. It was as uncalled for as horns on a hog. The end had already come, in one swift slide from the all-time peak of cattle drives to nothing. Fully 600,000 head had reached Kansas in 1871, mostly to the Abilene region, and perhaps 300,000 of these had not sold at all and would have to be wintered mostly at the drover's expense—thin-hided Texas cattle in sub zero country, and without hay or shelter.
On top of the overgrazing, a wind-driven prairie fire swept over much of the range, leaving it black as dusty velvet, to swirl up in gray clouds of soot. Finally the worst fall rain that even the Indians could remember washed over Kansas and up through Wyoming and Dakota Territory. The wind shifted to the north, turned the rain to ice and then to a blinding three-day blizzard. Even buffaloes froze to death, and the toll among the greenhorns out for hides was never really calculated. Old troopers died between army posts, and even trappers and long-time buffalo hunters were missing until the snow thawed off. The Texas cattle, poor-fleshed and weather-soft, froze by the thousands or drifted into gullies and canyons perhaps a hundred feet deep in loose, wind-swept snow. It was wholesale ruin for the drovers. Some worth $100,000 in the fall were bankrupt in May. Skinners swarmed out with the first thaws to strip the dead stock, 50,000 hides shipped out from one station alone, enough to break the market for the buffalo hunters, too. One cattle company got a herd of 3,900 head up to the sheltered, long-grassed Republican River Valley and still found only 110 of them alive in the spring. Many did worse.
So ended Abilene as a cow town, a trail town, a boom and bonanza town. The fancy saloons closed; the gamblers, the women, and the bad men drifted away, the bad men first of all. Where the great herds had tromped the earth of the corrals and the loading pens, horseweed, skunk mint, and the yellow rose of Texas, the sunflower, grew up fat from the rich earth memory of the cattle. Yet another memory remained of the boom days, the memory of the flamboyance that would always cling to the quiet town, a little like the outlines of the bull visible through the paint on the front of the old saloon.
The Santa Fe Railroad reached Newton, Kansas, July, 1871. Stockyards were built and with the old Chisholm Trail shortened and straightened out, the place became a booming cow town overnight. For one season it was the roaringest and bloodiest cow town of Kansas. Saloons, dance halls, and gambling houses sprouted on the shimmering plain. The tough district, Hide Park, was some distance out and included, as was usual, a dance hall called the Alamo. There was no town organization that first season—only a couple of justices of the peace, constables, and a sheriff with deputies. Twenty-seven places sold liquor, eight provided gambling, with eighty professional gamblers working the town, but no church or religious organization anywhere.
Once more almost the first to reach the new place were the gunmen. Boldest, most arrogant was perhaps Art Delaney, known as Mike McCluskie, an agent of the Santa Fe Railroad hired as marshal by the saloons and gambling houses to keep the Texas cowboys under control. In August there was an election to vote $200,000 in county bonds for the Newton and Southwestern Railroad down to Wichita. A Texas gambler served as special policeman at the polls. Somehow he angered Mike McCluskie of the Santa Fe, who shot and killed him. Hugh Anderson, a friend of the dead man up with a herd of Longhorns, swore to get McCluskie on sight. He was backed up by a crack-shot Kentuckian and two Texans not bad on the bead either.
One August night, when the cattle boom was about a month old, McCluskie came into the Tuttle Dance Hall with Jim Riley, a thin, tubercular youth who followed the railroad gunman around like a little fice dog that barked and snapped from behind his master. Mike McCluskie was warned that Anderson and his outfit were gunning for him but he lingered at the gambling tables, with Riley lounging near the door. Suddenly the door was kicked open and Anderson, his fellow avengers, and several cowpunchers stomped in. The click, rattle, and whirr of the gaming stopped. McCluskie jumped up, reaching for his gun, but Anderson fired first and the marshal turned as from a blow and dropped, mortally wounded. A peacemaker rushed in to quiet the men, but young Riley, with his beloved friend bleeding on the floor, drew his guns and began shooting. He sent the peacemaker staggering to fall dead outside. He brought Anderson and five of his men down, two of them dead, one fatally wounded, and three bad-hurt in the fighting. Two bystanders were hit, one to die later. Then, as suddenly as he started the slaughter, the youth with the deadly aim coolly stepped out into the night.
The new marshal organized a posse but Riley was never seen again so far as Newton heard and some thought that was the way the town wanted it. Evidently Riley was GN, Gone North, as people had been saying GTT, Gone to Texas, for a long time. A few years later there was talk that he might be the outlaw called Doc Middleton up in Nebraska and Dakota. Doc sometimes used the name Jim Riley and he was slim, blond, quiet spoken, but not tubercular so far as anyone knew. To be sure, the open life of the outlaw was considered very good for that disease and for several others, too, except lead colic.
The Tuttle Dance Hall massacre, with nine men shot in fewer minutes, roused the better element of Newton. They organized a town government, built a jail, and hired five policemen to keep the Texans headed straight down the chute in the future. But settlers had been swarming in everywhere along the railroads the last couple years. They brought quiet to the town, they and the growing depression in the East, with jobs scarce as Democratic chances, now that Grant was running again. Everywhere across the Newton trail settlers were measuring off homestead lines with a rag tied to a spoke of a wagon wheel and counting the turns. They broke strips of prairie and warned the Texas drovers off their sod corn and beans and setback wheat, holding them up for damages to grass and crop. Now the justices of the peace, elected men, were suddenly switching sides, turning against the voteless drovers. One of the early settlers was an advance man for the German Mennonites, a religious and frugal people who came with palmfuls of smu
ggled Turkey Red wheat hidden in their pockets.
Ellsworth, out west of Abilene on the Kansas Pacific, had been a cattle market before Shanghai Pierce turned his herds there from the trail to Abilene in 1871. He found no buyers there either, but less organized opposition to these Texans who brought the business than had grown up at Abilene. The comical trio of old cattlemen, big Shang Pierce and his friends Seth Mabry, the five-foot-three cattle king, and One-Armed Jim Reed pooled their unsold herds, 3,000 big steers, to be wintered together for early sale ahead of the 1872 drive. Pierce managed to sell 1,000 of his to the government before that.
The next spring the Kansas legislature pushed the tick quarantine line westward, making it illegal to drive Texas cattle not only to Abilene, now that the whole region was deserted, but soon to both Newton and Ellsworth. Angrily, McCoy pointed out that all these towns had really been illegal summer market for "through" stock, meaning straight through from the tick regions, ever since 1867.
With around 40,000 cattle wintered in the region, Ellsworth, even though sharing the drive with Newton on the Santa Fe, became the leading shipping point on the Kansas Pacific Railroad in 1872. By midsummer more than 100,000 Longhorns were grazing around the town and the fires of the cow camps dotted the night prairie like steady fireflies. Even without ready buyers the Texas herds had to be set upon the trails. Cattle, unlike a bale of cotton or coal in a mine, could not be held for a rise. After a steer reached maturity, holding meant aging past top sale, with expenses for care and grass piling up.
During the unhappy summer of 1873, 177,000 cattle were reported up the trail by July, with thousands more on the way. The seventy-six cattlemen, mostly Texans, who owned the herds included the Colonel Myers who had worked with McCoy to start the Abilene trade in such high optimism. Even without the money of a good cattle market, many gamblers were tolled to Ellsworth, including, of course, the Thompsons. Once more Ben came first, with Billy up the trail a few days later. Ben hoped to go into the saloon business but found it overcrowded. Apparently he pawned his diamond stickpin and ring, and with a little borrowing on the side, got enough cash together to set up gambling tables at Joe Brennan's saloon, known as Gamblers' Roost by the cowboys.
Cad Pierce and Neil Cain drove herds up from Austin about the time the Thompsons arrived. Cain often dealt monte at Thompson's tables and Pierce bucked the board. Here, too, the law was Union; County Sheriff Whitney, a northern veteran and old Indian fighter and Brocky Jack Norton, one of Hickok's deputies back in the old Abilene days, the city marshal. They worked for order and got it through to mid-August, without a serious gun fight. By then the herds were tapering off for the season, and the town fathers decided a small, cheaper police force would do. They fired two of the men, and three days later the town had a shooting that gave it a wild name. Some noted gamblers in at Brennan's were playing for unusually high stakes. The Thompsons were there but not playing, Ben trying to look after Billy, who was drinking too much. Cain was dealing monte and Cad Pierce, with considerable money in his pockets, wanted to bet higher stakes than Cain would take. Ben Thompson got John Sterling to cover the extra money. John, a little drunk, volunteered to cut Ben in on half the winnings. But when he won $1,000 he picked it up, put it in his pocket, and left.
From there on the stories told were many, but it seemed that Ben Thompson ran into Sterling the next afternoon and reminded him of the promise. Unarmed, he got struck in the face and so he went for Sterling with his fists but a policeman held him off with a six-shooter. Later, at Brennan's, while Ben was talking this over, a policeman and Sterling, carrying a shotgun, passed the swinging doors. One of them called in, "Get your guns, you damned Texans, and fight!"
Nobody would loan Ben a gun. Running out for his own pistol and sixteen-shot rifle, he accepted the challenge of Sterling and the policeman. "Meet me at the railroad grade and we'll have it out with no bystanders getting hit!" he called after them.
But in the meantime Billy Thompson, already pretty drunk, had got to Ben's double-barrel shotgun and let it go off, striking the sidewalk at the feet of Millett and little Seth Mabry, so Ben had to go to take the gun away from him. Soon a real crowd was gathering against them and he gave the gun back, but reluctantly. "Now be careful, Billy," he ordered.
Sheriff Whitney heard about the disturbance and unarmed, in shirt sleeves, went out to the Thompsons, who insisted they wanted no trouble. Ben hadn't even been armed.
"Well, put up your guns now, boys," he said. "I'll see you're protected."
Together the three went back toward Brennan's saloon, walking friendly abreast. At the door a Texas cowman yelled a warning, "Look out, Ben! Here they come!"
Ben whirled, saw the policeman running up with his gun drawn. In the shooting that followed Sheriff Whitney was hit by a load of buckshot from the gun in Billy Thompson's unsteady hands.
"My God, Billy, you've shot our best friend!" Ben protested. Three days later Whitney was dead.
The Thompsons and their friends claimed it was an accident but the newspapers and the officers denied this, pointing out that Billy slipped away to his horse and fled while Ben watched with the reloaded shotgun ready. After the mayor disarmed the policeman, Sterling and the others with them, Ben finally surrendered and was released on bond. Later one of the new policemen ran into Cain and Pierce, a good friend of Billy Thompson's, on the street. Although Pierce was unarmed, the officer shot him twice, chased him into a store, and beat him over the head with the gun until his skull was broken. Alarmed, the town organized a vigilance group to rid Ellsworth of undesirable Texans and issued a warning to Lone Star men—the very men who made Ellsworth's boom, even though cattle had fallen to giveaway prices. The governor of Kansas offered a $500 reward for Billy Thompson but he was gone down the trail to Texas. Later a Ranger picked him up in Austin and sent him back to Ellsworth. There the town's women got interested in him, brought him cakes and meat pies and other presents in jail until he was released.
The railroad for which Newton was voting bonds the day her massacre started reached Wichita the summer of 1872. The town, on the old Chisholm Trail, was by many days the nearest northern rail point to the incubator, the cradle of the Longhorn. For many years Wichita had been an outpost and trading center for Indian Territory, the freighting point for the various Indian agencies and army posts. Government men and contractors were common here from back when the first bull trains plodded back and forth to the Territory, their wagons dusted from the trails through the red country. Now the town had a peculiarly varied and noisy population. Trail-gaunted cowboys hunted up barbers and bathhouses to wash away the red dust before they went on the town, to stalk through the milling of land-seekers, buckskin-breeched old scouts and plainsmen, Mexican ranchers and trail drivers with their wide flat hats and an occasional colorful serape over a shoulder. There were brightly-blanketed Indians, too, from the Territory and many, chiefly from the Civilized Tribes who had brought the first plug hats to the region, now dressed like the politicians, businessmen, or ranchers that they were. The gamblers were in town, too, some in flashy vests or the deceptively quiet frock coats, the madams plumed and silken, the dance-hall girls in flashier dress. One gambling house sent a brass band parading the crowded street to lead the customers to the door. Here and there signs appeared:
Anything goes in Wichita. Leave your revolvers at police headquarters and get a check. Carrying concealed weapons is strictly forbidden.
There was a fiddling preacher in town. He elbowed his way from one crowded saloon to the other and sang a popular ballad with fiddle accompaniment, perhaps a song of a girl waiting for her wandering cowboy, or of a cowboy who would never return. Afterward he played a couple of hymns, preached a little hell-fire and damnation, invited everybody to the services in the dugout schoolhouse, and pushed his way out, his fiddle shielded under his arm. Publicly he ignored the girls who chucked him under his bearded chin or moved up close against him, and what he did in private was nobody's business in Wichita.
For several weeks the town was terrorized by Hurricane Bill Martin and his Texas gang, known as cattle rustlers and dangerous men. They rode down the streets shooting and yelling, with or without the cooperative permission of the officials, depending upon who asked to know. Eventually vigilantes were organized here, too, and under their pressure the marshal, afraid to move, asked an attorney to arrest Hurricane. The man tried it, while half the town watched, or wished later that they had been watching, well out of gunshot, of course. Turned out to be pretty tame. Bill gave up his gun without a peep as loud as a new-hatched meadowlark on the prairie. With the help of the citizens fifteen or twenty of the gang were lined up and marched over to the police station where the judge fined the lot and threw Hurricane into jail.
Although Wichita seemed to be booming, it was a boom that nearly everybody realized must be short as the tail of a January calf. The busiest spot of all was the land office, and the settlers scattered their dugouts, soddies, and log huts all along the streams and over the high tableland. There were Indian scares but most of the fighting was far to the southwest, usually against white thieves stealing the reservation horse herds or the buffalo hunters that the troops were supposed to hold north of the Arkansas River. But the hide men slipped past the disinterested bluecoats and chased the buffaloes to the Cimarron and deep into the Panhandle, leaving only rotting carcasses where the great herds had moved dark and fat for the fall hunts of the Indians.
The year of 1873 had started uneasily. There was the dead smell of graft over Washington, a stink worse than spring on the buffalo ranges, with rumors of bribery in Con- gress by the Crédit Mobilier. Women managed to relieve the dullness of their lives a little by the scandalous stories of Henry Ward Beecher and the beautiful Mrs. Tilton. Then came Black Friday and the collapse of the nation's financial structure, banks falling like a herd of stampeding Longhorns going over the cap rock. The scare of war with Spain over the Cuban massacres was called an attempt to save Grant's administration with a war boom. But that collapsed, too. Although 405,000 cattle came up the trail during Wichita's second summer and spread out 100 or more miles through Kansas, it wasn't much like the booming 600,000 head to the Abilene region in seventy-one except that there was no market in 1873 either.