by Paul Martin
Born in Frederick County, Virginia, in 1830, John Parker moved to Washington as a young man. In 1855, he married Mary America Maus. The couple would have three children together. Originally a carpenter, Parker had become one of the capital’s first one hundred fifty officers when the Metropolitan Police Force was organized in 1861.
Parker’s record as a cop fell somewhere between pathetic and comical. He was hauled before the police board over a dozen times, facing a smorgasbord of charges that should have gotten him fired, but he received nothing more than an occasional reprimand.4 His infractions included conduct unbecoming an officer, using intemperate language, and being drunk on duty. Charged with sleeping on a streetcar when he was supposed to be walking his beat, Parker declared that he’d heard ducks quacking on the streetcar and had climbed aboard to investigate.5 The charge was dismissed. When he was brought before the board for frequenting a whorehouse, Parker argued that he’d only been there to protect the place—like a bank robber claiming he’d taken the money to safeguard it.6 That he kept getting away with such behavior says as much about the police department of the period as it does about Parker.
In November 1864, the Metropolitan Police Force created a permanent detail to protect the president, made up of four officers. There must not have been any performance standards for the group, since John Parker was named to the detail. Parker was an unlikely candidate to protect anyone. He was the only officer with a spotty record, so it was a tragic coincidence that he drew the assignment to guard the president on the night of April 14.
As usual, Parker got off to a lousy start that fateful Friday. He was supposed to relieve Lincoln’s previous bodyguard at four o’clock but was three hours late. When he finally showed up at the White House, Parker was ordered to report to Ford’s Theatre and wait there for the president and his guests.
Lincoln’s party arrived at the theater at around nine o’clock. The sparkling morning had given way to a foggy, chilly evening. The play had already started when the president and his companions entered their box directly above the right side of the stage. The flags put up in honor of the president’s visit draped the front and sides of the box, a lively contrast to the somber crimson wallpaper that darkened the interior. The actors paused while the orchestra struck up “Hail to the Chief.” Lincoln bowed to the applauding audience and took his seat in a comfortable upholstered rocking chair. Witnesses reported that relief and happiness seemed to soothe Lincoln’s craggy, careworn face.7
Officer Parker was stationed in the narrow passageway outside the president’s box, seated in a chair beside the door. Parker’s irresponsibility soon revealed itself. From where he sat, Parker couldn’t see the stage, so after Lincoln and his guests settled in, he abandoned his post and moved to the front of the first gallery to enjoy the play. Later, Parker committed an even greater folly: at intermission, he joined the footman and coachman of Lincoln’s carriage for drinks in the Star Saloon next door to Ford’s Theatre.8
John Wilkes Booth entered the theater sometime before ten o’clock. Ironically, he’d also been in the Star Saloon, working up some liquid courage. When Booth crept up to the door to Lincoln’s box, Parker’s chair was still empty, giving the assassin unfettered access to the president. Booth timed his attack to coincide with a scene in the play that always sparked loud laughter. Some of the audience may not have heard the fatal pistol shot, although inside the president’s box it must have been deafening.
No one knows if John Parker ever returned to Ford’s Theatre that night. When Booth struck, the vanishing policeman may have been sitting in his new seat with a nice view of the stage. Perhaps he stayed put in the Star Saloon. Just as likely, he could have been ensconced in the nearest cathouse—or leaning against a lamppost staring at the moon.
Even if Parker had remained at his post, it’s not certain he would have stopped Booth. According to an interpreter at today’s Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site, “Booth was a well-known actor, a member of a famous theatrical family. They were like Hollywood stars today. Booth might have been allowed in to pay his respects. Lincoln knew of him. He’d seen him act in The Marble Heart, here in Ford’s Theatre, in 1863.”9 However, had Parker been present to admit Booth to Lincoln’s box, Booth would have lost the element of surprise and his attack might have been thwarted.
A fellow presidential bodyguard, William H. Crook, wouldn’t accept any excuses for Parker. He held him directly responsible for Lincoln’s death. “Had he done his duty, I believe President Lincoln would not have been murdered by Booth,” wrote Crook. “Parker knew that he had failed in duty. He looked like a convicted criminal the next day. He was never the same man afterward.”10 Nevertheless, Parker escaped punishment for his actions. Although he was charged with failing to protect the president, the complaint was dismissed. No local newspaper bothered to follow up on the issue of Parker’s culpability, and he wasn’t mentioned in the official report on Lincoln’s death. Why he was let off so easily is baffling, although in the upheaval following the assassination, perhaps he seemed like too small a fish to bother with.
Incredibly, Parker remained on the White House security detail even after his pitiful performance. At least once, he was assigned to protect the grieving Mrs. Lincoln before she moved out of the presidential mansion and returned to Illinois. (Prior to the assassination, Mrs. Lincoln had written a letter on behalf of Parker exempting him from the draft, and some think she may even have been related to him on her mother’s side.)11 Mrs. Lincoln’s dressmaker and confidante, former slave Elizabeth Keckley, recorded this outburst by the president’s widow directed at Parker:
“So you are on guard tonight—on guard in the White House after helping to murder the President.”
The shaken Parker made a feeble attempt to defend himself:
“I could never stoop to murder—much less to the murder of so good and great a man as the President. . . . I did wrong, I admit, and have bitterly repented. . . . I did not believe any one would try to kill so good a man in such a public place, and the belief made me careless.”
Mrs. Lincoln snapped that she would always consider him guilty and ordered him from the room.12
Parker remained on the Metropolitan Police Force for three more years, but his shiftlessness finally did him in. He was fired on August 13, 1868, for once again sleeping on duty. Parker drifted back into work as a carpenter. He died in Washington in 1890, of pneumonia. Parker, his wife, and their three children are buried together in the capital’s Glenwood Cemetery—on present-day Lincoln Road. Their graves are unmarked.
No photographs have ever been found of John Parker. Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg wrote him off as a “muddle-headed wanderer . . . a weird and elusive Mr. Nobody-at-All—a player of a negation.”13 Parker remains a faceless character, a clown who fostered a tragedy. But what might have happened if Parker had done his duty and not abandoned his president?
Obviously, if Booth had been turned away, President Lincoln would have lived and would probably have served out his term in office. If that had happened, some of the acrimony of Reconstruction might have been avoided, and racial equality would surely have been advanced more forcefully, possibly improving race relations today. Whatever the outcome, we know that Lincoln would have applied the balm of forgiveness to the nation’s wounds. That opportunity for Lincoln to at least attempt to forge a fairer, more united United States is really what the feckless John Frederick Parker stole from the country.
Libby Thompson
The long golden days at the Sunbeam Rest Home were uniformly peaceful and quiet, like a dress rehearsal for the afterlife. For ninety-seven-year-old Libby Thompson, the Los Angeles care center offered a final snug harbor at the end of a tumultuous journey. Wizened to a wisp and kept alive for years on buttermilk and the occasional shot of whiskey, Thompson bore little resemblance to the pretty, petite woman she’d once been. Beyond her window spread a green lawn dotted with palm trees, although the frail little gray-haired lady with the f
linty expression could no longer appreciate the view. Blind and failing, she’d sunk into the hazy realm of memory.
If Thompson had been aware of her surroundings, she probably would have spit in contempt. In the spring of 1953, all people seemed to be gabbing about was that new Superman TV show, or Patti Page’s silly song about the doggie in the window (the one with the waggly tail). These days, people thought they had it tough swinging the payments on a new Chevy Bel Air, and they got all excited if they caught a glimpse of a second-rate movie star down on Hollywood Boulevard. Folks sure were different now.
Libby Thompson knew the kind of real problems life could fling at you. When she was a kid, Americans were still fighting the Civil War. Growing up in the wilds of Texas, Libby had to worry about Indian raids and drought and whether her family would make it to the next harvest. Of course, people today would think she was lying if she were to tell them about the old days—when she caroused with the likes of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Bat Masterson.1 She’d run her own dance hall and whorehouse back then. Her customers had known her as Squirrel Tooth Alice, one of the more colorful madams of the Old West. Yep, Libby Thompson had seen quite a lot in her century of life, and much of it would turn your face bright red. Her story captures some of the gritty truth about a time and place in American history that has been mythologized almost beyond recognition.2
Thompson’s improbable adventure began in 1855 in the Brazos River Valley. She was born Mary Elizabeth Haley but was always known as Libby. Her father, James Haley, owned a dozen slaves and a good size farm south of Fort Worth. Though not rich, the family was better off than most. Libby and her two sisters grew up thinking of themselves as privileged, but the Civil War fixed that. With their slaves emancipated and much of their wealth gone, the family faced economic insecurity and physical danger. Their farm in Hood County lay on the edge of the frontier. As part of the prairie homeland of the Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache, that chunk of Texas came under frequent Indian attack. Sometime near the close of the Civil War, when Libby was around ten or eleven, a Comanche raiding party stole her away from her family, an event that set the course for her life.3
It’s uncertain how long Libby remained a prisoner, perhaps up to three years. Her parents were finally able to get her back in exchange for some horses. As if she hadn’t endured enough by then, once Libby returned home, she suffered from the worst sort of prejudice. On the assumption that her captors had sexually abused her, she was shunned by white society (Libby never spoke about her captivity). It was common for white females who’d been held captive by Indians to be regarded as spoiled, untouchables of a sort. Libby reacted to the injustice by thumbing her nose at those who looked down on her. When she was thirteen, she became the mistress of a considerably older man. She told people they were married, though that’s doubtful.4
Nothing is known about Libby’s lover, but the fellow must have been a more generous soul than most white people of the time. Unfortunately, James Haley didn’t regard him as noble. Haley thought the man was taking advantage of a young girl. When Libby brought her beau home to meet her parents, her father shot him dead on the front porch.5 It’s not hard to guess how Libby must have felt. Captured by Indians, rejected by her own people, and now cut off from someone who’d offered her love and acceptance, she did the only thing that made sense to her—she ran away from home.
By 1869 or 1870, when she was about fifteen, Libby ended up in Abilene, Kansas, where she found work as a dance hall girl. Recently established as a railhead, Abilene became the first great Kansas cattle town, the destination for herds of Texas longhorns driven up the Chisholm Trail after the Civil War.6 When cowhands reached Abilene and collected their pay, they went looking for three things—whiskey, games of chance, and women. The town did its best to meet those needs, recruiting “entertainers” of all stripes. Abilene bulged with saloons, dance halls, and bordellos. Libby was part of an army of women who descended on Abilene with the intention of sharing in the prosperity, a phenomenon that would be repeated in cattle and mining towns all over the West.
As a dance hall girl, Libby played the lively hostess—chatting up customers, encouraging them to buy drinks, and, yes, even dancing with them, just like Miss Kitty on Gunsmoke. Her job, however, didn’t require her to engage in sex.7 That was left to the “fallen angels” who plied their trade in the local bordellos, which ranged from veritable mansions to shabby backstreet “crib houses.” While prostitutes in the Old West were often forced into the trade by poverty, only a few made much money at it. The bulk of the profits went to the pimps, madams, and brothel owners. The “soiled doves” usually ended up with nothing other than a venereal disease and an addiction to alcohol or drugs. Many committed suicide. (Libby Haley also worked as a prostitute off and on, but she was lucky enough to survive, maybe because she’d been toughened by her earlier experiences.)8
Around the time that Libby left home, she met the man who would figure most prominently in her life, one “Texas Billy” Thompson, a hotheaded cowboy, gambler, and rustler who was at least ten years her senior. Libby and Texas Billy would share many an adventure over the next couple of decades. It was an unconventional relationship, but for the most part, it turned out to be as durable as a rawhide lariat.
Throughout their time together, Libby and Billy slipped back and forth between legitimate work and criminality with the nimbleness of a pair of otters sliding down a muddy creek bank. That wasn’t so unusual in the rough-and-tumble frontier era, when people occasionally did desperate things to make ends meet. Single women had it especially tough. For them, honest jobs were few, and those that existed—cook, seamstress, laundress—paid starvation wages. As a result, prostitutes and dance hall girls far outnumbered “decent” women in cattle towns.9 For men, jobs were often seasonal or boom and bust, leaving them to improvise at times. A hardworking drover, for instance, might be tempted to appropriate a few head of cattle to get through the winter. The challenging conditions made it difficult to tell a “hard” man from a “bad” one. In a strange sort of fellowship, even lawmen and known criminals drank and gambled together. Sometimes, the only difference between a peace officer and a desperado was a tin star (legendary marshal Wild Bill Hickok was just as likely to gun someone down over a game of cards as uphold the law).10
Libby and Texas Billy made a contrasting couple—she a pert little five-footer with dark curly hair and he a nearly six-foot beanpole with a handlebar mustache. The mismatched mavericks spent their first couple of years together on the Chisholm Trail. Libby came along when Billy was driving cattle north from Texas to the Kansas railheads. The pair frequently lived out of a covered wagon, or even in caves or crude shelters dug into a hillside. Whenever they hit a cattle town, Libby donned her ruffled skirts and slipped into her role as a dance hall gal, while Billy employed his card-playing skills. They had a series of more or less permanent homes in northern Texas, but they spent much of their time on the trail or bouncing between towns in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas.
It was in Kansas that Libby acquired the nickname she would use for the rest of her career: Squirrel Tooth Alice. In Abilene, she met a saloonkeeper with an unusual hobby—he loved to feed the prairie dogs that flourished on his property, and he had a lively trade in catching and selling them as pets. A type of ground squirrel, prairie dogs can make interesting companions. Libby Haley was taken by the cute little animals and soon had one of her own, which she kept on a leash like a toy poodle. Since Libby’s front teeth were slightly prominent and had a noticeable gap between them, she adopted the name Squirrel Tooth Alice as her professional sobriquet. (Dance hall girls and prostitutes often went by a nickname, in some cases to hide their identity. The curious custom produced such fascinating handles as Big Nose Kate, Dutch Jake, Cotton Tail, Peg Leg Annie, Irish Queen, and Timberline.)11
By 1872, the railhead had moved west to Ellsworth, Kansas, and Libby and Billy followed. Like Abilene, Ellsworth was wide open, with saloons and bordellos lining the dusty st
reets. Drunken cowboys routinely charged through town, firing their pistols in the air. Libby and Billy got on well in Ellsworth. While Libby shook her booty in the dance halls, Billy haunted the local gambling dens. At the age of seventeen, Libby was a striking beauty, but she had no trouble fending off amorous cowboys. Everyone knew she was Texas Billy’s girl, and Billy’s reputation with a gun forestalled any untoward advances. Plus, the mere thought of angering Billy’s older brother, Ben Thompson—the top gunfighter of his day, according to some—kept rowdies in check.12
In the spring of 1873, Libby and Billy again took to the Chisolm Trail. Libby rattled across the rolling grasslands in a covered wagon while Billy did his part to keep hundreds of cantankerous longhorns pointed north. In April, as they crossed the Oklahoma Territory, Libby gave birth to their first child, a boy they named Rance. The baby’s arrival prompted the hard-living couple to turn conventional for a change. So their child would be legitimate, the two got married that July in Ellsworth. The couple’s blissful stay in Ellsworth was interrupted when Billy got liquored up and shot the local sheriff, Chauncey Whitney.13 To avoid arrest, Billy scooped up Libby and little Rance and fled westward. The family hid out in the mountains of Colorado for several months before returning to Texas.
By 1875, Billy was back on the cattle trails. Dodge City was then emerging as the newest railhead—and the wildest spot on the Kansas prairie. When Libby and Billy Thompson blew into Dodge, they resumed their usual trades. At the time, Billy’s brother was a card dealer in Dodge City’s famous Long Branch saloon. In the town’s raucous bars and dance halls, the Thompsons rubbed elbows with future western legends Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday.14 Earp had been hired to bash a few heads and otherwise tone down the revelry that had regular citizens afraid to walk the streets. Libby became good friends with the marshal’s mistress, Mattie Blaylock.