by H. H. Knibbs
In November, Ed Crawford returned to Ellsworth in the middle of a big binge. He and two companions went to Nauchville, and there he consumed a large quantity of redeye whisky at Benson’s saloon. Then he went to Lizzie Palmer’s place. He was either bluffing or too drunk to know what he was doing, for the house was crowded, and most of the crowd were Texans. He was recognized, and when he went into the hallway toward one of the bedrooms, three men followed. The bedroom door was locked inside, and the three men put their shoulders to it to break it down.
The parlor occupants heard a burst of pistol shots, and when they reached the hallway, they found the bedroom door lock blasted off, and Ed Crawford dead on the floor, curled up on his side in a big blob of blood. One bullet had torn through his head, and another had pierced his stomach and smashed his spine.
Ben Thompson said he heard that Ed Hogue was scared out of Ellsworth after the Crawford shooting, and that he went out West and was hanged on a charge of horse-stealing. Ben did not go back to Ellsworth that year. From Kansas City he went to St. Louis, where he boarded a river boat for New Orleans, and from there went on to Austin.
In Ellsworth, a murder complaint was sworn out against Billy Thompson. But Billy had vanished deep in the Texas brush-lands, where he did little worrying about the new charge. Two other murder warrants were out for him in Texas. But he was only one man of three or four thousand men on the “wanted” list at the time. There was small likelihood that anybody would try to capture him. The outlaws were far superior to the law men in numbers and armaments.
The law men, in fact, got one of their worst jolts that same year. On July 21, 1873, the first train robbery in the United States occurred at Adair, Iowa. Jesse James, Frank James, Cole Younger, Jim Younger, and three other men held up the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific train. They took four or five hundred dollars from the passengers, besides something like three thousand dollars from the baggage-car safe.
The sensational event had repercussions everywhere. Outlaws drew inspiration from the coup; forces of law and order, desperation.. At the same time, however, the law men also felt that the limit had been reached. The realization came to the enforcers everywhere: they must outshoot, outride, and outsmart the desperadoes, or submit to universal anarchy. But one obstacle, and a big one, still stood in the way of such effective action. The Indians in the Southwest were on the warpath again. To the embittered tribes, all white men looked alike, whether on the side of the law or against it.
So, “good” men and “bad” joined forces, fought side by side in common defense of their lives and homes, knowing that when this was over they would be fighting each other again.
CHAPTER 36
Ben Thompson was in Austin when the Cheyenne War of 1874, up in the Indian Territory, spurred the less peaceful tribes in Texas to redouble their depredations. The vicious cycle was in motion. There seemed to be no solution but extermination of either the white men or the red.
In Texas, the Comanche warriors provided the most direct threat. An expedition was organized by Major Edward Burleson Jr., who called for volunteers: old Indian fighters, ex-soldiers, or anybody at all who could ride and shoot, and who would be willing to march with his company of plains rangers. Ben went with them.
This was one of many expeditions under way throughout the Southwest. The Indians felt that the white man could not be trusted. They pointed to violations of the Medicine Lodge Treaty. The white men not close to the Cheyenne conflict were aware only of unrelenting aggression on the part of the Indians.
The Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 had guaranteed the Cheyennes and the Arapahos and other tribes a five-million-acre reservation with hunting rights south of the Arkansas River. To implement a policy of building up friendship among the Indians, the federal government deliberately chose Quakers as agents among the Indians. The westward tide of migration, however, was no respecter of treaties, and the federal government, generally speaking, was neither able nor willing to make any serious efforts at enforcing the pacts.
Depredations by white settlers on the Indian camps brought quick retaliation. The Indians had been building up their grievances for some time now. The buffalo hunters swarmed over the plains, wherever the rich harvest of hide and bone might be found, ignoring boundary lines between red men’s and white men’s lands. Sportsmen slaughtered the buffalo, the Indian’s great food supply. Other settlers, hungry for farm-and home-lands, moved in on Indian territory, the realm of chiefs like Little Robe and Stone Calf.
The policy of brotherly love failed in the face of the violent contest for the land. A high point was reached with the Battle of Adobe Walls in June, 1874. Open warfare prevailed. Indian Agent Miles went up the Chisholm Trail from Indian Territory to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in July, to seek military support. While he was en route, fellow Quakers passed a set of resolutions condemning him for this step. Miles passed through Wichita, and the temper of the times is reflected in the comment of the Wichita Eagle in the issue of July 16:
“These broad-brimmed, swallow-tailed worthies rolled their pious eyes and resoluted Friend Miles out of office because he asked for troops to save their hair. Do these thee and thou dapper galoots imagine they can resolute a man out of office and into silence who is being made bald by a scalping knife?
“Do these wall-eyed, shad-bellies expect to sit upon their cushioned seats afar off in safety and by their pious twaddle about Indian schools and civil order silence the shrieks of the mother whose child has been ruthlessly torn from her arms by top-knotted painted Red Devils and its brains dashed out against the nearest stone? Or squelch Major Miles for asking for protection for himself and the defenseless?”
With others who heeded similar calls to arms, Ben Thompson rode as a member of the Burleson Expedition when it moved toward the headwaters of the Brazos River, and his story of the campaign was recorded by Buck Walton, Ben’s lawyer. The Indians retreated across the vast, trackless plains. Pursuit was made difficult by scarcity of water. The company of rangers pushed on, past the Double Mountain, into the spurs of the sierras that rise above the Pecos River.
The pursuers plodded on for forty days, and still found no Indians. Apparently the tribesmen had sought shelter beyond the bluffs and canyons of the Staked Plains between the Pecos and the Canadian. The horses were tiring. The men were weary from the steady march. Major Burleson ordered an about-face and decided to make extended camp at the first suitable spot. They found one slightly north of the headwaters of the North Concho and south of the Red fork of the Colorado.
Here there was abundant water, plenty of grass, and a variety of game: buffalo, deer, elk, turkey, quail. For two days the whole company hunted. Huge amounts of meat strips were jerked and dried and after the treatment in the sun stored up as a supply good for ten days or more. Then there was little to do but eat, sleep, and relax, with guard duty alternating among the thirty men in the company. As part of his equipment, Ben had brought several decks of cards. For hours on end he dealt at a friendly (small stakes) game of monte. As counters, the men used fragments of copper ore that covered the ground.
After ten days, the company broke camp and continued the homeward march. They had been jogging along in a loose file-by-two formation for about five hours when Major Burleson called a halt to reconnoiter. In the high trails of the Twin Mountains, alongside their line of march, the Indians could follow them unobserved and close in on them. Ben and Buckskin Sam Hall volunteered to climb the sierra and take observations. Each rode toward the hills with a Henry repeating rifle in his saddle boot and a pair of six-shooters on his belt.
Ben and Sam scouted along the top of the hill for several hours, moving slowly westward toward the big red ball of the setting sun. A yellowish haze spread over the still air, and the men became aware of a heavy, rhythmic rumble in the distance. They decided that Sam would keep watch at that spot, while Ben rowelled his pony and climbed to the crest of the last of the rolling
hills.
On the side of the hill, Ben saw thousands of buffalo charging upward, right toward him, and in the midst of that great herd, perhaps eighty or a hundred Comanches on horseback.
“They had seen me,” Ben related, “and they no longer paid any attention to the flying animals, but started to chase me, for they would rather have me than all the robes on all that mass of animals.”
Ben wheeled his horse and raced toward Sam, about two miles away.
“Here they come,” Ben related, “and their long, black hair was floating on the wind, and their eagle feather ornaments waved alongside their painted faces.”
Sam saw Ben in a mad gallop toward him and immediately pulled his rifle and fired at the oncoming Indians, then turned, and the two put spurs to their horses, driving them up the next hill, a long grade. Ben said he could feel his mount growing weaker and weaker, as the Indians kept gaining ground. A shower of arrows fell around the fleeing pair.
“We must check them,” Buckskin Sam shouted, “but a shot at this pace isn’t much good.”
“Let’s shoot anyhow,” Ben called back, “shoot for life.”
Four or five Indians were about sixty yards in advance of the others, and two “huge fellows” were well ahead of the vanguard. They had gone over the hill along with Ben and Sam, and the race was now on a fairly flat stretch approaching the next rise.
“Shoot at the front man on the left,” Ben yelled, “and I’ll take the other.”
They checked their reins and both men fired their six-shooters. Each scored a hit, and the two Indians dropped from their horses. The others increased their speed and loosed a new volley of arrows, striking like a swarm of heel flies.
All through the ride, Ben and Sam kept turning back to see how close the Indians were. They pulled up again to take aim, picked their targets and fired. One Indian horse fell.
“Better push ahead, Sam, and alarm the others,” Ben said.
“No, I’ll stay and take my chances with you,” Sam said, as the two wheeled and fired again.
At the foot of the hill, Ben’s horse fell, wounded by an arrow. Ben leaped from the pony as the animal toppled. He sought shelter behind his fallen mount and pulled the rifle from the boot on the saddle. He kept firing as rapidly as he could, as the Indians charged headlong toward him, and Sam was shooting as he spurred his horse up the rise.
“Before the Indians reached me,” Ben told Walton, “Burleson and his men came charging over the crest, his men yelling as only Texan Rangers can yell.” The Indians whirled their horses around and sped away, the Rangers in pursuit.
Ben said his neck was paralyzed from the constant turning as he rode away from the Indians. He was afraid he might have to turn his whole body with his neck for the rest of his life, but it cleared up in about two months.
After the expedition, Ben wintered in Austin and the next season followed The Trail to Wichita, Kansas.
CHAPTER 37
Besides being the rail point closest to the Chisholm Trail in 1874 and 1875, the town of Wichita, Kansas, was also distinguished by Ida May’s very exclusive establishment, west of the Douglas Avenue bridge. At Ida May’s, only men from the South—and that included Texas, of course—were acceptable as clientele. She did not require, as do some fancy restaurants, that the men wear coats and ties. But she guaranteed the gentlemen from the South that they could have their evening of pleasure without the blight of so much as the sight of a damn Yankee.
Joseph (Rowdy Joe) Lowe and his partner, Kate, were also there, operating what was known among south Texans as “the swiftest joint in Kansas.” Ben Thompson renewed his acquaintance with Joe there, strictly on friendly terms, although only a few months back, Ben had cleaned out Joe’s place in Luling, Texas—a resort billed as “the toughest dance hall in America.” Luling had been for a short time the terminus of the railroad moving southward in Texas, and as such a trail town of brief but violent duration. It was also the freight terminus for the Chihuahua, Mexico, cattle trade.
All the sporting world that had made a fast trip to Luling and to Newton, had later moved on to Wichita, along with their colleagues from Ellsworth and elsewhere. Wichita was a kind of dress rehearsal for Dodge City, which in 1875 and 1876 began its career as the trail town to end all trail towns. Feuds and animosities of previous seasons were transplanted to Wichita. Perhaps because of so much diverse and interlocking hostility, a kind of balance of power had been established.
Wyatt Earp, gambler, buffalo hunter, and amateur law enforcer, was getting some professional training as a member of the Wichita police force. The admirers of this legendary figure attribute the comparative freedom from bloodletting to his performance as an enforcer of the gun-toting ban. Undoubtedly Earp’s prestige carried considerable weight among the boys from Cowskin Creek, the site of many of the cattle camps. For Wyatt was regarded as a dead-shot on a par with Ben Thompson.
Men who knew both Ben and Wyatt figured them as straight fifty-fifty odds in an encounter, with the probability that they would kill each other. Such a clash never took place, and Ben and Wyatt were on friendly terms throughout Thompson’s stay in Wichita. At meetings of old-time trail-drivers’ of Texas, the story used to be told of an “understanding” between Thompson and Earp; that Ben agreed to use his influence among his fellow-Texans to restrain their ebullience, and in return there would be no attempts, such as had occurred in Abilene, to “run over” the visitors on the part of the local professionals or peace officers.
Be that as it may, Ben Thompson stuck pretty much to his last, using his hands for dealing monte and faro, and giving his six-shooter something of a well-earned rest. When in town, he could be seen daily at Whitey Rupp’s “Keno House,” which ran twenty-four hours a day. It featured that lucrative lottery, keno, and had facilities, as well, for many other gaming pastimes. But Ben was not in town continuously during the 1874 or 1875 seasons. In his absence, the Texas-Native feud went on as usual, hot heads and hot guns mixing it frequently in a series of efforts to “hurrah” the town.
During this period, Ben did more traveling than usual. The cattle play was spreading. And there were other lures, too, such as swelled army payrolls when the federal government sent reinforcements out West to fight the Indians. Ben moved in and out of Wichita. He ran his faro game in Ellsworth again, where the murder charge against Billy still remained an unsettled account legally. And in Dodge and Hays, with occasional excursions to the Texas panhandle town of Mobeetie. There, playtime facilities had been set up for the soldiers at nearby Fort Elliott.
At Mobeetie, Ben Thompson saved the life of Bat Master-son. Bat was then a lad of twenty-two, a veteran of a season of buffalo-hunting, and working at the time as a civilian scout for the army. Ben was dealing faro at the Lady Gay in Mobeetie, where Bat Masterson and other army people were spending some of their time and money. Among those present that particular evening was a widely known gambler, adventurer, and gunfighter, Sergeant King of the United States Army. He had served in the Civil War while still in his teens, had been on Indian-hunting expeditions, and had killed a half-dozen men in personal encounters. King had many friends among the trail-town campers, whom he joined each season, taking a furlough from army life to become a cowhand for a season.
Masterson and King got into an argument on the dance floor. Both went for their six-shooters. Bat’s .45 led the draw. He ordered King to throw his pistol on the floor, meanwhile walking toward the sergeant. As he reached King, the trooper dropped his revolver. At the same moment, Bat lowered the hammer on his Colt and brought the pistol up alongside King’s head. The sergeant slumped and lay on the floor for several minutes, while Masterson stood over him. When he regained consciousness, King picked up the pistol Bat kicked over toward him. Masterson ordered him out of town, and kept him covered till King mounted his horse outside and headed for Tascosa.
Bat returned to the festivities inside the Lady Ga
y. King, after an hour or so, turned his horse back to Mobeetie. At a side door of the Lady Gay corner, King waited. He heard Masterson’s laughter inside. As he crouched in the shadows, he saw Anna Brennan, known as Wild Rose, approaching, carrying a lantern. King hailed her and told her that Bat Masterson wanted to see her, and that he was inside the Lady Gay. The girl reputedly had a crush on Bat and eagerly complied. She knocked at the door. Bat opened it. Anna said, “I heard you wanted to see me.”
As Bat appeared, King stepped into the open doorway, placed his pistol at Masterson’s groin, and fired. Bat reeled backward into the Lady Gay, drawing his pistol as he staggered. Bat’s .45 flared and roared. The girl stepped between the two men, and in that instant, King fired a second shot. All three fell to the floor. King, shot through the heart, lay spread-eagled. Bat squirmed in pain, and the girl clutched at him, talking, her voice growing fainter by the second until it was stilled by death.
Every armed man in the Lady Gay went for his pistol. Several soldiers, with drawn revolvers, moved toward Bat, who still held his pistol, and it looked as if they would finish him. At that point, Ben Thompson leaped atop the faro table, and with his six-shooter in hand commanded the soldiers and everybody else to step away. He ordered all the armed men to drop their weapons, and backed the crowd against the far wall until Bat Masterson could be moved away by friends to get medical attention. For months after his recovery, Bat Masterson limped. He went to Dodge City, where his brother, Jim, was on the police force, and Bat took a job as an officer of the law. He used his cane as a nightstick until his leg was healed.
Most of the 1876 season, Ben Thompson was in Dodge City, one hundred fifty miles west of Wichita. Dodge had been a wild city on the Santa Fe Trail before it became the wild terminus of the Jones and Plummer cattle trail, the far west successor of the Chisholm. It had been the center of the buffalo trade for hunters, meat packers, mule-skinners, bull-whackers, soldiers, and hide dealers. Now, great mounds of bleached bones along the tracks told of the last treasures the hump-backed beasts had yielded.