The Mammoth Book of the West

by Jon E. Lewis

  A more serious perpetrator of the James–Younger bandit tradition was Belle Starr’s nephew, Henry Starr (“The Bearcat”), who gained his schooling in guns in the Starr family’s feud with neighbouring Cherokee clan, the Wests. According to Evett Nix, who knew him, Henry Starr was a “man of magnetic personality”. He was also an inveterate criminal, serving his first jail term for the murder of deputy Floyd Wilson. After disarming fellow inmate Cherokee Bill, however, Starr was released. He stuck up banks in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Colorado, punctuating these with terms in prison. On 27 March 1915, he rode with his gang into the small town of Stroud and, like the Daltons before him, attempted to rob two banks on the same visit. He was wounded making his getaway and arrested. Released from prison a year later, he was killed by a shotgun blast in the face, courtesy of cashier William J. Myers, while trying to hold up the People’s National Bank at Harrison, Arkansas.

  When Starr began bank robbing he did so on a horse; for his last hold-up he went by car. Thus in Henry Starr was personalized the link between nineteenth-century brigandry and “1920s Mid-West gangsterism.” Among his associates was Al Spencer, whose own lieutenant was Frank “Jelly” Nash. In 1933 Nash was captured by the FBI and accidentally killed during an ensuing attempt to free him by the pomaded gangster Charles Arthur (“Pretty Boy”) Floyd at Kansas City railroad station. Only with the extermination of the Mid-West Dillinger-type gangs by the FBI in the 1930s did the outlaw dynasty founded by the James–Younger gang finally die.

  Frontier Lawmen

  Lawmen, Badmen

  The frontier lawman spent as much time sitting in his office chair as he did in the saddle leading posses. Peacekeeping in the West was a job of many paper chores and administrative duties. There were records to be kept, court notices to be posted, reports to be written, wanted notices to be read, written and filed. When the lawman left his office, there were dogs to be shot (for a fee), fines to be collected, streets to be repaired, and stray steers to be moved.

  Pay was low, although supplementary fees for duties performed could be high. Even in sparsely populated Cochise County, Arizona, Sheriff John Behan garnered an estimated $40,000 a year undertaking such common lawkeeping tasks as serving summonses, attending court, and advertising property for sale. But if the job of lawman was mundane, it also carried the sudden, chill risk of danger. Many towns had an ordinance against the carrying of firearms within town limits. Along with arrest of fugitives, enforcement of the firearms ordinance probably constituted the most dangerous part of a sheriff’s job. Many Westerners regarded the taking of their “shooting irons” as an infringement on their manhood and their rights as freeborn Americans. Marshal Joe Carson lost his life in just this way in January 1880, trying to disarm the Henry gang in the Close and Patterson Saloon in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Accompanying Carson was his deputy Dave Mather, who avenged his boss by killing one gang member and wounding another.

  If disarming frontiersmen was dangerous in Las Vegas, it was doubly so in a Kansas cowtown, where Texas cowboys whooping it up were drunk and unpredictable, as well as proud, and not inclined to take orders from Northern peace officers. A famous such incident involved Dodge City marshal Edward J. Masterson, older brother of the more famous Bat Masterson. At 10 p.m. on the evening of 9 April 1878 Ed Masterson and his deputy, Nat Haywood, quietly disarmed drunken cowboy Jack Wagner at the Lady Gay Saloon. Masterson gave the pistol to Wagner’s trail boss, A. M. Walker. As Masterson and Haywood went outside, Walker returned the pistol to Wagner and both dashed outside after the lawmen. Masterson began grappling with Wagner for the gun, and when Haywood stepped forward to help, Walker prevented him doing so at gunpoint. Suddenly, Wagner’s gun went off, the bullet entering Masterson’s stomach. Mortally wounded and his clothes on fire from the gun flash, Masterson managed to shoot Wagner in the bowels and Walker in the arm and lungs. Wagner died the next day. Walker, however, eventually recovered.

  Ed Masterson was a genuinely popular lawman, and something of a standard above previous policemen in the city, two of whom – William “Buffalo Bill” Brooks and Jack Allen – had backed down in fights. “A PUBLIC CALAMITY” said the Ford County Globe of Masterson’s death, eulogizing: “Everyone in the city knew Ed Masterson and liked him. They liked him as a boy, they liked him as a man, and they liked him as their marshal. The marshal died nobly in the discharge of duty; we shed a tear upon his grave . . .”

  Few other lawmen would receive such a fulsome tribute.

  Harried town officials frequently appointed hardcase gunfighters to keep order, men who were little or no better than the rowdies they were intended to control. Thus did Ellsworth add the drunken loudmouth gunfighter known as John “Happy Jack” Morco to its police force. Morco, who had fled California after killing four unarmed men, antagonized Ellsworth’s cowboys and citizens alike, the latter numbering English-born gamblers Ben and Billy Thompson. After he had sparked a fracas in which Billy Thompson shot Sheriff Chauncey Whitney, Ellsworth finally dismissed Morco. He refused to be disarmed and had to be shot dead by a police colleague, J. C. Brown.

  Morco was a far from isolated example. The number of men who spent as much time on the run from the law as they did wearing a badge is legion. “Mysterious” Dave Mather, reputed to be a descendant of puritan theologian Cotton Mather, had a career as a horse thief, train robber, con man (selling “gold bricks” to gullible cowboys, an enterprise in which he was partnered by Wyatt Earp), jailbreaker and road agent, as well as serving as a policeman in Las Vegas, New Kiowa in Kansas, and Dodge City. In Dodge he quarrelled with Deputy Marshal Tom Nixon – and shot him. (In 1888 Mather disappeared “mysteriously” and forever. Other lawmen who were prominent badmen were Jim Miller (paid assassin), Buffalo Bill Brooks (lynched as a horse thief), Lon Chambers (train robber), Jim Clark (thief), John Webb (extortionist, murderer and close friend of outlaw Dave Rudabaugh), Willard Christianson (rustler and bank robber), and Texas’s John King Fisher (rustler), the last-named the West’s gaudiest gunman. He was once spotted by the Texas Rangers decked out in a pair of chaps made from the skin of a tiger he had shot at a circus, a beaver hat, a silk shirt and a brace of ivory-handled guns. Also from Texas was “Longhaired Jim” Courtright who began a protection racket in Fort Worth, where he used to be sheriff, in which gambling joints were “policed” in return for a share of the takings. The diminutive, fastidiously dressed gambler Luke Short, who owned a third of the White Elephant Saloon, refused to pay. Courtright sent a warning; the two men met in February 1887, and Courtright pulled a gun. The hammer caught in Short’s watch chain, giving Short time to pull his weapon and shoot Courtright three times. Courtright died within minutes.

  On at least one occasion a lawman committed a major crime while actually in office. This was Henry Newton Brown of Caldwell, Kansas, who held up the bank in the neighbouring town of Medicine Lodge in May 1884, murdering the bank’s president. Brown and his accomplices were chased by citizens, Brown being shot in the process. His cohorts were lynched. Before hiring on as Caldwell’s town marshal, Brown had been a cattle rustler and had served as a “Regulator” alongside Billy the Kid during the Lincoln County War.

  Such men as Brown, Courtright and Morco were tolerated in office if they did not abuse its privileges too outrageously, and above all kept order. So successful had Brown been at installing peace in Caldwell that only six months before his robbery of the Medicine Lodge bank, burghers had presented him with a new Winchester rifle and a silver plate commending his “valuable services to the citizens of Caldwell.” In a similar vein, when outlaw and gunfighter John Daly gained control of the Nevada mining town of Aurora in the early 1860s (through the neat expedient of having an acolyte elected town marshal), the local newspaper, the Esmeralda Star, noted that the people bore this with “utter indifference”: not least, because the first man John Daly – now appointed deputy marshal – shot was an unruly member of his own gang, one George Lloyd.

  To “tame” towns, different lawmen had differen
t methods. Brown used both a pistol and a rifle to kill rowdies in Caldwell. Abilene’s Tom Smith employed his fists, spectacularly flooring town bully Big Hank and gunman “Wyoming Frank” on consecutive days in 1870. Shotguns loaded with buckshot were favoured by lawmen the West over, among them John “Don Juan” Slaughter of Apache County, Texas, and Oklahoma’s Heck Thomas. However, to the consternation of lawmen those they “took alive” often escaped justice. Jails were rudimentary – where they existed at all – and inmates absconded with alacrity.

  To be counted amongst the most unusual lawmen of the West was New Mexico’s Elfego Baca. At the age of 19 Baca bought a mail-order badge, which he promptly used in October 1884 to “arrest” a cowboy called McCarty who was making Hispanics in the town of Frisco “dance” by shooting at their feet. After seizing the cowboy, Baca handed him over to the local justice of the peace. On the following day, however, 80 cowboys led by McCarty’s rancher employer intercepted Baca; one of the cowboys shot at him. Baca ran into a jacal, a wood-and-mud hut, shoved the inhabitants out, and managed to close the door in the face of rifle-wielding cowboy Jim Herne. Baca then shot the cowboy through the door.

  Herne’s body was dragged away, and the cowboys began to shoot the jacal to pieces, keeping up volley after volley until dusk. The jacal, however, had a floor some 12 inches below ground level, and Baca was able to duck the bullets. From time to time, he fired back with an accuracy that killed three more cowboys and wounded others. At midnight, the exasperated cowhands demolished most of the building with a stick of dynamite; Baca survived, crouched in an opposite corner behind a portion of roof which had been caved in by rifle fire.

  To the disbelief of the cowboys, Baca was still alive next morning. They saw smoke from the chimney of the jacal. Baca was cooking breakfast.

  The shooting continued until late afternoon, when deputy sheriff Ross intervened. Baca surrendered at 6.00 p.m., having withstood the siege by 80 gunmen for 36 hours. A later examination of the jacal revealed that the door alone had 367 bullet holes in it.

  After the “miracle of the jacal”, Baca utilized his fame to secure various public posts, among them sheriff of Socorro County. One of his stratagems as a properly legal sheriff was to send letters to all the local fugitives telling them to surrender or suffer his wrath. A number of men actually complied. Baca died at the age of 80 having become one of New Mexico’s leading lawyers.

  Fighting Outlawry in Oklahoma Territory

  Perhaps the most outstanding peace officers in the West were some of those who worked under Evett Nix, the US Marshal of Oklahoma Territory. A former grocer, Nix was appointed (to some amazement) Marshal of the Territory by President Grover Cleveland in July 1893. What the ex-grocer brought to the task was organizational skill, and under his direction 150 deputy marshals were put into the field with an iron determination to end outlawry in the Territory. Nix set high standards, telling the Guthrie Daily News that he would have “none but honest men around me”. He added: “The time has gone for swashbucklers who fence themselves round with revolvers and cartridges. A revolver will be for business and not for show.”

  Nix’s sceptics accused him of “searching the ranks of democracy with a microscope to find this brand of Sunday school moralists from which to make sleuthhound saviours of banks and express trains.” The novice 32-year-old marshal quickly proved them wrong. His deputies included three of the greatest lawmen in the West, William Mathew (“Bill”) Tilghman, Chris Madsen and Henry Andrew “Heck” Thomas. The trio worked in semi-independence from their colleagues, hunting down major outlaws like the Doolin gang, and were quickly christened the “Three Guardsmen”.

  Chris Madsen was an adventuring, red-haired Dane who, before pinning on the badge of a deputy, had fought in Italy for Garibaldi, in Africa for the French Foreign Legion and in the West for the US Cavalry. A spell as homesteader farmer had proved too tame and he accepted a commission for deputy US marshal, operating from El Reno, Oklahoma. The next year he was transferred to Guthrie and was highly active in pursuing fugitives until the outbreak of the Spanish–American War, when he joined the Rough Riders, a mounted regiment organized by Theodore Roosevelt. After returning from Cuba, Madsen re-entered law enforcement and in 1911 was appointed US Marshal for Oklahoma. Among those brought to justice by Madsen were Dalton/Doolin gang member Red Buck Weightman and train robber Felix Young.

  In a famous episode in Beaver City, Oklahoma, in 1893 Madsen entered a saloon to stop drunken revellers shooting the place up, disarming one man by seizing his pistol. At this, another belligerent shouted: “I’m a son of a bitch from Cripple Creek.”

  “I knew who you were,” replied Madsen, “but I didn’t know where you were from.” A third reveller tried to pull a gun, but Madsen was quicker, and winged him in the shoulder.

  Like Madsen, Heck Thomas saw service as soldier, joining the Stonewall Jackson Brigade of the Confederate Army when he was 12. He went to Texas after the Civil War, joining the Rangers, and earning a commendation from the governor for the single-handed capture of the two Lee brother outlaws. Before serving under Nix, Thomas had worked as a deputy for Judge Parker in Indian Territory. It was Heck Thomas’s shotgun that finally ended the career of outlaw Bill Doolin.

  Bill Tilghman, the third of the Three Guardsmen, was already a renowned lawman before he came to Oklahoma, having served as the marshal of Dodge in 1884–6. When Oklahoma was opened up for White settlement in 1889 Tilghman took part in the land rush, but soon reverted to marshalling in the new Territory. Evett Nix offered this portrait of “Old Bill” Tilghman:

  Tilghman was one of the handsomest men I ever knew – six feet tall, he weighed about one hundred and eighty pounds, and every ounce of it was sinuous muscle. His kind blue eyes and his open countenance reflected good will and friendliness to all he met. I have never known a man who regarded his enemies more kindly than did Bill Tilghman – and I have never known a man who fought his enemies more bitterly or more effectively than did Bill Tilghman when circumstances demanded it. Looking into his soft blue eyes, it was very hard to believe that the same eyes had looked down the barrels of flaming six-guns and rifles and dealt death to a great many men. During his service as my deputy, more rewards were paid to him for captures than were ever paid to any officer in the same period of time in the history of the United States.

  Bill Tilghman was to serve longer than any of the lawmen made famous by the clean-up of Oklahoma Territory, and was voted a state senator. In 1915, incensed at the portrayal of federal officers in a movie depicting the bandit career of Al Jennings (whom Tilghman had pursued), the retired lawman directed a filmic riposte, The Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaws. Secretary of the company which produced it was Chris Madsen, and the movie’s underwriter was Evett Nix. The men saw themselves as setting the record straight.

  Bill Tilghman died with his boots on. Aged 70, against the advice of friends, he became marshal of rowdy oil town Cromwell, Oklahoma. On the night of 21 November 1924, Tilghman heard a shot in the street and went to investigate. He found the offender and took his gun away. But the offender had a second gun, which he drew and shot the great lawman down.

  The offender was a drunken federal prohibition agent.

  The Legend and Life of Wyatt Earp

  Bill Tilghman was not the only ageing lawman to develop an interest in motion pictures. Wyatt Earp spent many of his twilight years in Hollywood, and even appeared as an extra in the 1916 Douglas Fairbanks feature The Half Breed. His admirers counted among them Western film stars Tom Mix and William S. Hart, both of whom were pallbearers at Earp’s 1920 funeral. Another of Earp’s Hollywood admirers was the young John Ford, later to direct the Earp biopic My Darling Clementine. Thus Earp took a strong hand in the creation of his own legend, simultaneously enlarging and sanitizing a career in “town taming” which, in truth, had little to justify his posthumous reputation as one of the West’s great heroes.

  Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp came of pioneer stock, and was descended fro
m a Virginian agrarian-lawyer clan who migrated westward in chain-like fashion, first to Monmouth, Illinois (where Earp was born on 19 March 1848), and then to Missouri, Kansas and by wagon train to South California.

  Earp’s early career was as a teamster in California, Arizona and Wyoming, where he also refereed prizefights in the railroad camps. On 10 January 1870 he married Irilla H. Sutherland, the daughter of a neighbour of Earp’s Illinois grandparents. The marriage lasted less than a year, when Irilla died in a typhoid epidemic. For some time afterwards, Earp drifted aimlessly. Near the town of Van Buren, Arkansas, he was caught horse-thieving, and was only saved from hanging by the intervention of his father. Nicholas Earp paid his son’s bail – and then suggested he abscond.

  Wyatt Earp then took up buffalo hunting in Kansas, and during a visit to Ellsworth in 1873 was offered a job as marshal. He refused. But in 1874 he arrived in Wichita, then the boom town of the cattle trade, where his invalid Civil War-veteran brother James was a bartender and James’s wife Bessie ran a brothel. With the buffalo fast disappearing, Earp decided to hire on as a policeman, serving under Sheriff Mike Meagher. Most of Deputy Earp’s duty consisted of patrolling Wichita’s red light district, Delano, and ensuring that the cowboys who thronged the town observed the Deadline, the boundary which they were not allowed to cross wearing firearms. Among the transgressors Earp was obliged to arrest was the giant, 220-pound Texas cattleman Abel “Shanghai” Pierce. On this occasion, Pierce was too drunk to be dangerous. Earp himself was eventually kicked off the force for fighting and for neglecting to turn in fines collected from prostitutes.