Negroes and the Gun

by Nicholas Johnson

  A similar scene played out in Abilene in 1870 when a saddle-weary trail crew camped on the outskirts of town and then rode in seeking entertainment. Their black cook consumed more than his share of cheap whiskey and started firing his revolver into the air. The booming cow town had just built a new jail, and the black cook was its first occupant. His stay was cut short when his hungry trail mates broke him out at gunpoint, making him both the first prisoner and the first escapee from the new jail.

  No doubt there was plenty of discrimination and racial harassment in the cow towns that led to gunfire. And sometimes, as in the case of John Hayes, Negroes did all of the shooting. John Hayes was refused service in a saloon that was attempting a “whites only” policy. Hayes, with a budding reputation as the “Texas Kid,” drew his revolver and shot up the saloon.

  John Hayes’s violence was gratuitous. But Henry Hilton was literally pulled into a fight that ended in deadly gunfire. Hilton owned a small ranch near Dodge City, Kansas. He was in town for provisions when a group of white cowboys aimed to make sport of him. They exchanged tough talk, and Hilton warned them that he would not stand for any “hazing, even if he was a nigger.” Then one of the men lassoed him and tried to pull him off his horse. Hilton drew his revolver and killed the man. Before he could appear on the shooting charge, Hilton got into a late-night saloon brawl with a black cowboy named Bill Smith over some unrecorded slight. The two men emptied their revolvers and died from their wounds.

  This was not the only time black cowboys shot one another. In the winter of 1870, the Laramie Weekly Sentinel reported that a man named Pressley Wall was shot and killed at the Bullard Saloon by Littleton Lawrence, “both colored.” In Cheyenne, an argument at a black prostitute’s crib left a Negro known only as Dozier limping to the train station, bleeding from three bullet wounds presumably from a black assailant.77

  Although film depictions suggest otherwise, blacks participated on both sides of the infamous Lincoln County War that propelled Billy the Kid into legend. At least three black men rode with Billy the Kid. Riding with the opposing forces were “Negro” (probably “Nigger”) John Clark, as well as a detachment of black cavalry. At least one of these black men, George Washington, survived the conflict to join territorial governor Lew Wallace’s Lincoln County Riflemen in 1879. For a short, violent period, the Lincoln County Riflemen were the dominant force for order in the tumultuous environment.78

  Black men figure prominently in other, less famous conflicts. In 1883, a black cowboy who answered to “Nigger Jeff” went with his employer, rancher Dick Grier, into Mexico on an invitation to buy cattle. It turned out to be an ambush, and only three of Grier’s group made it out alive. One of them was “Nigger Jeff,” who covered the retreat of his trail mates with gunfire and then escaped to nurse his own wounds. Other Negroes of the west pursued less honorable paths—men like the nameless gunfighter who was contracted to kill another bad man named Mexican Joe. Mexican Joe was quicker on the trigger.

  The recorded story of the black west often focuses on the sensational—the bloody, boozy conflicts that rose to the level of news. The countless less colorful folk who populated the west and made decisions to acquire and carry arms can only be guessed at. We are left mainly to speculate about the practice of arms among the field hands, stockyard workers, miners, saloon entertainers, prostitutes, hoteliers, and ordinary black settlers who populated the American west.79

  But even within this category of more pedestrian firearms use, colorful tales of men like Willis Peoples survive. Peoples owned a small ranch near Mead, Kansas. The community was agitated about a large wolf that had been killing cattle, and raised a reward for the wolf’s hide. Peoples said that if they would leave the wolf alone and give him a few weeks, he would bring it in. Peoples trailed the animal, stalked within fifty feet of it, and killed it with a rifle shot to the head. Riding into town with a nearly seven-foot-long wolf carcass, Peoples became a minor celebrity.

  We are also generally left guessing about episodes where men simply brandished guns to staunch some threat or drew guns on one another, then backed down. An 1881 report from Raton, New Mexico, confirms the second category. A Negro and a white cowboy pulled their six-guns over some slight and then backed away without firing. We learn about this averted violence incidentally within the story of the white cowboy dying later that evening in a shootout with another man.80

  The power of bluster and bluff is underscored in the autobiographical account of Nat Love, also known as Deadwood Dick. At least by his own telling, Nat Love had a talent for otherworldly marksmanship. His stories and self-proclaimed reputation hit all of the stereotypes of western exploits with the gun. Love was a self-promoter whose grand depictions of his multilayered prowess invite worries that some of his claims are exaggerated or fictitious.81 But the dubious exploits of men like Nat Love gain a degree of credence in light of similar, more readily verifiable adventures of other improbable Negro cowboys.

  Some of the best records of blacks in the frontier west come out of the effort to bring a measure of law to Indian Territory. It is not only lawbreakers but also black lawmen who frame the scene. What passed for law in the territory was mainly federal, and starting in 1875, was famously administered out of Fort Smith, Arkansas, by hanging Judge Charles Parker. Parker’s records chronicle a significant black presence in the violent territory. Among the criminals who came before him, Parker hanged thirty whites, twenty-six Indians, and twenty-three blacks.

  The black population in Indian Territory also produced abundant lesser criminal activity and armed conflicts fulfilling the stereotypes of western violence. It hosted notorious black outlaws like Dick Glass and Crawford Goldsby. Glass led a life of violence and crime that ended in 1885 in a shootout with Indian policeman Sam Sixkiller.82 Crawford Goldsby survived long enough to build a bigger legend. He was the son of a black woman with Indian and European linage and a light-skinned Buffalo Soldier named George Goldsby, who sometimes passed for Mexican. George disappeared when Crawford was only two years old, under circumstances that are interesting in their own right.

  In 1878, Sergeant George Goldsby commanded a squad of black soldiers at Fort Concho, Texas. The relationship between white Texans and the Buffalo Soldiers was often tense. There were the typical racial taunts. And sometimes whites took potshots at the black troopers who traveled around Texas towns and homesteads. After one of these episodes, George Goldsby allowed his soldiers to take their rifles to settle a dispute with some local whites. With the shooting done, unwilling to trust the army’s judgment of his decision, Goldsby fled and never saw his wife or son again.

  With his father on the run, young Crawford Goldsby was shipped east to the Indian school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. When he returned west as a teenager, he was physically a man and soon found a man’s trouble. A saloon quarrel with an older Negro cowboy led to drawn guns and Crawford fleeing the scene as a killer. Sometime during this period, Goldsby picked up the name Cherokee Bill. He answered to it when he joined the Cook Gang, a mostly black outlaw band, some of them ex-slaves of Cherokee Indians.

  Fig. 4.5. Shoot-out at Fort Concho. (Frederic Remington’s How the Worm Turned, oil on canvas, April 1901. St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY.)

  Cherokee Bill did everything one expects from a western outlaw—thieving, eluding posses, gun fighting, and murder. Bill’s most notorious act of violence was shooting his brother-in-law in an argument over some pigs. Bill also killed a barber, a train-station agent, and a train conductor. After a robbery where he killed a bystander, Bill was arrested and convicted of murder. His saga continued with appeals of his conviction to the United States Supreme Court and an escape attempt with smuggled guns. He finally was hanged in the summer of 1895.83

  The black outlaws in Indian Territory highlight the blunt errors of formal racial categories. Cherokee Bill’s lineage included many strands of the American melting pot. So too, the Rufus Buck Gang, which plundered the territory for a short, violent spurt. They a
re reported alternately as Indian, black, and mulatto. An arresting officer described the leader, Rufus Buck, as part black. Photographs suggest that the gang members were a blend of Negro, Native, and white. After a short, violent career of robbery and murder, the gang was run to ground by black Creek Indian police. They surrendered after seven-hour gunfight and died under Judge Parker’s hanging justice in July 1896.

  Other interracial gangs operated along a similar trajectory. Men like Tom Root, Buss Luckey, and Will Smith rode with a gang of train robbers who fought gun battles against pursuing posses and ultimately were executed under sentence from hanging Judge Parker.84

  Some gun criminals in Indian Territory disappoint the stereotype. Della Humby was a simple bully who killed his wife and ambushed an Indian policeman who tried to arrest him. Other lawmen fell to gunfire from men like “Captain” Wiley, a Negro living among the Seminoles. Wiley killed a federal marshal in what he called a fair fight. He was arrested and died in custody at Fort Smith. This was not the only episode where white lawmen fell to Negro gunfire. In 1892, on a train between Santa Fe and Gainesville, Texas, a black man and a white marshal shot it out after harsh words that started when the marshal sat in the Negro smoking car. It is disputed who drew first. But the marshal and one Negro died from gunfire, and two other black men were arrested.85

  Fig. 4.6. Rufus-Buck gang. (Photograph from 1895.)

  Black lawmen in Indian Territory demonstrate the diversity of the place. The deputy marshals who extended Judge Charlie Parker’s authority into the territory included at least twenty blacks whom we can verify by name and probably others who remain unknown because race was recorded only by happenstance.

  Bass Reeves is among the most storied of Parker’s black marshals. He is draped in tales of bravery, marksmanship, strength, and stamina that sometimes seem too fantastic to credit. But official reports level out the legend. Reeves is recorded killing fourteen men in the line of duty. He prevailed in numerous nonfatal showdowns and gunfights and rendered hundreds of whites, Indians, and Negroes to Charlie Parker’s justice.

  The instinct that Parker’s black marshals were somehow unique is refuted by men like Willie Kennard, a former Buffalo Soldier, who rode into the town of Yankee Hill, Colorado, and applied for the marshal’s job. A skeptical mayor tested his resolve by sending him to arrest one of the town’s notorious villains, a rapist who was drinking in a saloon down the street. In classic western progression, Kennard entered the saloon and the bad man drew his gun. But Kennard was faster. With gun smoke hanging in the air, he dragged the wounded rapist to jail and picked up the marshal’s star. He served the town of Yankee Hill for three years before moving on.

  Fig. 4.7. Bass Reeves, United States Marshal.

  Brit Johnson was not a lawman, but his bravery and exploits fill the expectations about the western hero and form the basis for a tale by a western novelist titled The Black Fox. Brit Johnson was probably born a slave, but by 1871, he was living near Fort Griffin, Texas, with his family. He was already renowned for his 1864 rescue of a group of women and children who were abducted from a settlement in Young County, Texas, by Comanche raiders.

  In January 1871, Johnson and three other black cowboys were hauling supplies to Johnson’s home when a Comanche band attacked. The details of Johnson’s last stand were reconstructed at the scene. All of Johnson’s trail mates were quickly killed. Johnson finally succumbed after inflicting multiple casualties. The Comanche corpses and nearly two hundred empty shell cases littered around the spot where Johnson lay dead were evidence of his fight to the death and his skill with the gun.86

  As we already have seen, the Buffalo Soldiers are a familiar landing in the story of the black west. These troops are steeped in irony, famously named by the plains Indians whose plight they might easily have sympathized with and whose final defeat they aided. Compounding this irony was the overhang of race in the interactions between the Buffalo Soldiers and many of the constituency they were assigned to protect. Their job as frontier security force was often complicated by the divide of race. The community feeling was evident in east Texas when two Buffalo Soldiers attempted to arrest a white man for murder. The murderer was a better shot and from a privileged class. He killed both soldiers and was acquitted by a jury of his peers.

  For Confederates moving west after the Civil War, black men in uniform were hard to abide. In Lincoln County, New Mexico, in two separate episodes, Confederate veterans shot black soldiers for entering diners and bars where whites were eating and drinking. One of these inveterate rebels, Frank Freeman, recently of Alabama, was captured by a squad of black soldiers and then escaped to tell that the soldiers planned to lynch him.87

  The fact that they were well-armed and trained to fighting discipline allowed the Buffalo Soldiers to strike back hard either in self-defense or in vengeance. In Kansas in 1867, a mob killing of three black soldiers triggered a gunfight in the streets as their squad mates rode into town seeking retribution. In El Paso, Texas, local police arrested two Buffalo Soldiers, prompting their platoon mates to storm in with government-issue carbines to break them out. Each side lost a man in the gunfire. In Wyoming, Buffalo Soldiers stationed at Camp Bettens endured taunts, threats, and then an attack by townsfolk on two of their platoon mates. They marched into town and retaliated with gunfire. The shootout ended with one casualty, a Buffalo Soldier lying dead in the street. The other soldiers received minor punishments by a military tribunal.88

  Even with the hardships they endured, the Buffalo Soldiers fared better than many Negroes of the era. The relative appeal of their lifestyle was evident in the decision former slave girl Cathy Williams to impersonate a man, hone her gun skills, and ride with US Colored Troops serving in New Mexico. She concealed her gender and did the work of a soldier until injuries sent her to the post surgeon, who reported that she was a woman and had her discharged.

  Fig. 4.8. Buffalo Soldier. (Dismounted Negro, Tenth Cavalry, Frederic Remington, 1886. From The Century Magazine 1889, vol. 15. General Photograph Collection, MS 362: 068-1095, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections.)

  When Ida B. Wells and folk from the east were dreaming of a western promised land at the end of the nineteenth century, being black in America was a challenge no matter where you were. Modern commentators describe this period as the nadir of the black experience in America. Although they might not have used exactly that word, the 1899 assessment of the Douglass Memorial Literary Society of Buffalo Soldiers was basically the same: “Resolved, that there is no future for the Negro in the United States.”89

  That sort of grim assessment, coupled with the focus here on deadly encounters and gunplay, demands a point of caution about the unfolding tradition of arms and the daily lives of Negroes. Even during the bleakest times, other things were going on. Black folk still laughed and loved and relished the comforts of family. So, in tracking the black tradition of arms, we must remember that it grew up from countless individual souls who, even under the common burden of racism, still had richly different experiences. They operated under a multitude of different impulses. They had different capabilities, dispositions, and internal lives. And these things magnified the variations rendered by differences like wealth, occupation, domestic situation, and complexion.

  Ida Wells developed an early appreciation for these sorts of differences as she moved gingerly into the circles of Memphis’s black elite. As she matured, the interaction of Wells’s inner life and her experience in the world produced what some said was a stern and sometimes difficult personality. And it is tempting to conclude that this was predictable. How indeed could someone whose best friend was lynched, someone who advised every Negro household to acquire the assault rifle of the day, have anything but a gloomy countenance?

  This sort of pop-psychological assessment often appears in the modern gun debate and likely will extend to assessments of the black tradition of arms. So it is useful to appreciate how the tradition of arms flourished among a
ll kinds of different folk operating under different circumstances—how even during the worst of times, Negroes with guns cannot be fixed into any particular “type.” Although we do not always have fully developed pictures of the countless folk who owned, carried, and defended themselves with guns, it is evident that they were a diverse lot.

  Ida Wells exalted the Winchester rifle and owned and probably carried a pistol. But she did more talking about guns than actual shooting. Mary Fields, whose late-nineteenth-century exploits in Montana earned her the sobriquet “Stagecoach” Mary, was exactly the opposite. Six feet tall and 200 pounds, Mary Fields worked, joked, drank, fought, cursed, and shot her way into the annals of legend in and around Cascade, Montana.

  She was born around 1832, probably in Tennessee. The details of her life in slavery are contested. Her own version was different from the familiar story of victimization. Still tough, vibrant, and feared at age sixty, Mary described it this way. “I learned . . . as a slave to say yes’em, and then do as I damn well pleased.” The specifics are difficult to verify, and Mary may have embellished the story of her early life to match her growing legend.90

  There is, however, agreement that she worked at the Ursuline Convent of the Sacred Heart in Toledo, Ohio, and then traveled west with some of the sisters who were taking Christianity to the Indians of Montana. Mary was the most valuable single resource at the mission, contributing skills as a carpenter, gardener, cook, and even healer, using herb and root knowledge gathered during slavery.

  Montana was surely no idyll. And intuitions about the petty indignities that a dark black woman would face there at the end of the nineteenth century are confirmed by reports that for most of her time in Montana, Mary Fields was not called “Stagecoach Mary” but “Black Mary,” and she actually signed her name that way.

  Mary’s black skin was an undeniable fact, but it was not a handicap. One of the first episodes in the legend of Black Mary Fields was a predictable clash along the color line. In the fall of 1892, the sisters at the mission hired John and George Mosney as laborers. The sisters paid the wages, but the daily assignments came from Mary.