WINMX Assorted Textfiles/Ebooks.tar/Text - Compilations - The Library - Volume 01 - A to C - 226 ebooks (PDF HTM(L) RTF TXT DOC).zip/Anderson, Charles D - Outlaws Of The Old West.txt

Text File | 2001-03-03 | 241KB | 4,284 lines

                          Outlaws of the Old West

                      Compiled by Charles D. Anderson

 ELECTRONIC VERSION 1.0 (Apr 04 00). If you find and correct errors in the
      text, please update the version number by 0.1 and redistribute.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------



INTRODUCTION

By Charles D. Anderson Editor, Mankind Books

Throughout history there have been men--and women too, for that matter--who
have placed themselves above and outside the laws that govern ordinary men.
Call them outlaws or criminals, their actions have been motivated by
personal gain, vengeance, rebellion and so forth... reasons very
justifiable to them. And those people are still with us, as a glance at the
front page of any newspaper will show.

The outlaws of the Old West weren't really that colorful, although some
were ingeniously enterprising and ruthless. And by today's standards their
crimes weren't that terrible. We are undoubtedly more appalled by reports
of senseless mass slayings today than the average person in Abilene was at
the news of a stage holdup. And while citizens walking the streets of Dodge
City might have been startled to find themselves in the midst of a
spontaneous gunfight, we sometimes find ourselves wondering whether it's
even safe to venture out onto the streets at all.

This is not intended to underrate the crimes of the Old West, because taken
on a relative basis they could be extremely serious to the victims. The
Frontier was isolated and desolate. Limited transportation and the
precarious trip itself had required men and women who had made the
phenomenal journey from the East to leave behind many prized belongings.
Consequently, private property was highly valued and would often be
defended to the death. Whatever possessions existed, whether for practical
or sentimental purpose, were essentially one of a kind items that could not
be simply replaced. They were belongings that represented hardship and
deprivation, and their loss through robberies and lootings could be a
heartbreaking catastrophe.

What really gives the outlaws of the Old West a unique quality--apart from
the romantic lore that has grown up around them--is the stage on which they
performed. And therefore, to fully understand their presence in the West
and their quick-draw motivations with the six-shooter, we have to
understand something of the times and temperament that was the American
West.

In many respects the Old West is like the ante-bellum South. It is a
civilization gone with the wind. There was no equivalent of the American
Frontier anyplace else in the world It was a land of backbreaking
challenges where survival itself was constantly jeopardized by awesome
obstacles. And it existed in a time when the United States was "a house
divided," with brother turned against brother under the glorious blue-gray
patriotism that was the Civil War.

The American Frontier represented the hope for a new start, for new lands
to conquer, and the entire westward expansion was the ultimate challenge to
the individualistic spirit that had first caused the colonists to break
away from the domination of England. The Frontier was and still is a truly
American institution, as John F. Kennedy reminded us in his inaugural
address when he spoke of the challenges that face us at the New Frontier.

The noted historian Frederick Jackson Turner theorized that the development
of the American way of life as we know it could be traced back to the
Frontier. It was a land of rebirth--a promised land that beckoned pioneers
who were strong in mind, heart and body. And in that rebirth, as
institutions were reformed and rethought, man became shaped by his
environment.

Also, according to Turner, it was a land that served as a "safety valve,"
utilizing the "wide open spaces" to minimize or remove the pressures that
had been building up within the cities of the East.

It seems as if the culture and technology of each era in American history
contributes toward the breeding of outlaws and criminals indigenous to that
period. A good example of this is the airline hijacker. And so it was that
the stage was set for the outlaws of the Old West--not only for those bred
in the Frontier spirit, but also for those who sought to escape the dutches
of eastern police. The openness of the land, and the majestic mountains and
deep canyons made the West a very attractive hiding place.

The very nature of the Frontier experience was also highly conducive to
outlawry. In the first place, honest money was very hard to come by. As the
article on Sam Bass points out, it would have taken a cowboy more than 33
years to earn the $10,000 that Bass picked up in one robbery. And that
cowboy would have worked in the dust and open air all month, from sunrise
until late into the night, and maybe have taken home $30.

While need inspired some outlaws, greed spurred others. Many a rustler
justified his thievery as he thought of the carte blanche that had
contributed to the success of the land, mine and railroad barons.

And then there were those who were either unwilling or unable to face up to
the demands of the West. Earning a living, when jobs were available, was a
back-breaking consideration. And as one author points out, in the case of
raising crops it could also be bitterly frustrating.

The days following the Civil War were free-wheeling and generally lawless.
Outlaws like John Wesley Hardin got their start because they were filled
with resentment at what they saw going on around them. Men who had faced
danger and death on the battlefield considered the West a land of
opportunity for anyone proficient and daring enough with a gun. And
initially there was hardly anyone to give them an argument. For a long time
the law was carried around in each man's holster, and he dealt that law
with a heavy hand, depending on which side of the fence he stood on such
cut and dried matters as cowboy vs. farmer and cattle vs. sheep. And
whoever had the more men and guns on his side obviously had a greater share
of the law.

There was hardly any taxation to speak of, and consequently some areas
simply didn't have the money to pay a sheriff. Squabbles amongst the
neighbors couldn't be settled by a quick call to the police, nor were the
courts available to make a judgment on a lawsuit.

Another factor that contributed to outlawry was the great surge of
boomtowns. As towns like Dodge, Tombstone, Abilene and Virginia City
mushroomed, their rapid, boisterous growth didn't seem to leave much room
for effective law enforcement. And the outlaws, quick to sniff out a good
thing, followed the boom.

But in the same way that factors inherent to the westward expansion
contributed to unbridled outlawry, the progress and the innovative spirit
that was the Frontier tradition helped to put it down. By 1869 the railroad
had already spanned the United States, and desperados who had escaped the
eastern police by vanishing into the painted expanse of the West were now
being relentlessly pursued. The coming of the telegraph speeded
descriptions of the outlaws from town to town, and the pony express
conveyed that well-known western publication, the Wanted poster.

Time was rapidly running out for the gunslingers and stage robbers, not to
mention the rustlers who were being severely frustrated by that new-fangled
stuff, barbed wire.

After a while some of the outlaws began to consider going straight. Both
the Wells Fargo stage line and the Union Pacific railroad hired former
outlaws to ride guard. Others tried to hold out until the end, and the end
usually meant a sheriffs bullet. In most cases they died relatively young,
which really isn't so surprising considering the life they had chosen for
themselves.

The Frontier spirit of the Old West seemed to inspire the outlaws toward a
code of honor all their own. And because of this some western outlaws have
been treated in motion pictures and on television as more hero than
criminal. Films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and even the
heavily documented How The West Was Won, show the grueling hardships, but
the end result is one of glamorization, of romanticizing the facts... not
unlike the treatment of those two other great American outlaws, Bonnie and
Clyde.

It's been said that being a hero is just a matter of being in the right
place at the right time. Perhaps the same is true of the outlaw. And for
men outside the law there has seldom been a time in this country's history
that has presented more opportunities than during the period that we have
come to know as the Old West.

RINGO : CHAMPION OF THE OUTLAWS

by Clayton Matthews

John Ringo strode the legendary streets of Tombstone, Arizona, in the
1880's like a brooding Hamlet among outlaws--introspective, darkly
handsome, absolutely fearless. Altogether a romantic but tragic figure.

In 1880 Tombstone was at the peak of boom times. It evolved from nothing to
a town of some six thousand people after Ed Schieffielin discovered silver
in the Tombstone hills in 1878, and started the Lucky Cuss mine. Tombstone
then sprang up out of the desert overnight. Before that it was an area of
brown, treeless hills, a land of cacti, greasewood, and hostile Apaches.

Unlike many other western boomtowns, Tombstone had some law and order--too
much law, some said. However, there were those people who said the lawmen
themselves were little better than crooks and killers. In 1881, Tombstone
even elected a mayor. But the two factions in town were feuding with each
other--Sheriff Johnny Behan and Marshal Wyatt Earp. Earp had the guns and
the power on his side: his three brothers and Doc Holliday, the ex-dentist,
who was as coldblooded a killer as any the West ever knew.

The feud between the two factions, according to most reports, sprang from
the fact that Johnny Behan was appointed sheriff of Tombstone and Cochise
County instead of Wyatt Earp. Marshall Earp stoutly denied that he had ever
coveted the job, but most stories have it otherwise. This feud is important
for the fact that Behan was also made tax assessor. Sheriff Behan soon
appointed one William "Billy" Breakenridge his deputy, and it fell upon
Breakenridge to collect the taxes. In a shrewd and daring move,
Breakenridge recruited Cochise County's most notorious cattle rustler,
Curly Bill Brocius, to help him collect the taxes.

Laughter ran through Tombstone like a flash flood, when the story spread
that Behan's deputy was using Curly Bill to collect taxes. This added fire
to the feud between the Earp faction and Johnny Behan. The Earps were the
leading figures of what had become known as the "Law and Order Party" in
Tombstone, and they made disparaging remarks about Behan's alliance with
the rustlers, notably Curly Bill's gang headquartered in the town of
Galeyville.

And John Ringo, while supposedly second in command of Curly Bill's bunch,
was actually the guiding spirit of the rustlers of Galeyville. Curly Bill
led the rustling forays more often than Ringo, but that was because of
Ringo's frequent withdrawals from his own kind.

John Ringo was a true enigma.

Most of the outlaws of the Old West were just plain bad, very little white
with the black. Perhaps it was in their genes and that was the particular
time for it, with very little in the way of law to stop them. Whatever
their reasons, many killed and plundered for the sheer joy of it.

In a few, there were equal parts of good and bad. John Ringo was such a
man.

Much has been written in fiction and shown on film about the gallantry of
western badmen toward women. This was not always the case. Many outlaws
would kill anything--men, women or children--if given a reason. Or for no
reason at all.

Ringo revered women. He shortened his name from Ringgold so that his three
sisters would not know of his outlawry. Even the lowest of women received
respect from Ringo.

And that other western canard--an outlaw will keep his word, even unto
death, and was always loyal to his friends--could have been coined to fit
Ringo. He never once broke his word or betrayed a friend's trust.
Gallantry? Loyalty? Fearlessness?

This would seem to describe a paragon among men. Not so. Ringo gambled,
drank to an excess, robbed and plundered and killed with a ferret's
ferocity. Billy Breakenridge, the deputy mentioned earlier and a deadly
gunfighter in his own right, was once asked who was the most outstanding
gunfighter he had ever encountered. Breakenridge answered without
hesitation: "John Ringo. Ringo would have made me look like an amateur...
as for Wyatt Earp, certainly I have no reason to like the man, but I
wouldn't deny that he must have been an expert with the six-shooter. And,
if Earp had been given the job of gathering in Ringo, I think that he would
have gone out and tried to bring Ringo in. So would I. But probably it's
just as well that I never had to go up against Ringo in a gunplay and my
own opinion is that Earp felt the same way."

Ringo never faced any of the Earp faction in a gun battle, but he defied
them a number of times, usually when he was drinking heavily.

Alcohol was Ringo's enemy more than any gun-fighter. He drank to
forget--his past and his present outlawry. He was a tall man, six feet two,
lean, with somber blue eyes. Since his birthdate is not a matter of record,
his age at the time he prowled Tombstone is not known.

He was born in Texas, spoke literate English and was clearly well-educated.
It was believed by some that Ringo had a college education, but this seems
doubtful. In Texas, while still in his teens, he became involved in a feud
between sheep and cattle men. His only brother was killed in the feud.
Ringo hunted down and killed the three men who had murdered his brother. He
left Texas to escape the law and wandered the West for years, earning his
way either by playing cards or with his gun, before coming to Tombstone at
the height of the boom and joining up with Curly Bill. It is not known how
many men John Ringo killed during his wanderings; he was not a man given to
boasting.

Ringo was a second cousin to the infamous Younger brothers of Missouri, so
perhaps it followed naturally that he was fated from birth to become a
killer and outlaw. At the time Ringo came to Tombstone his three sisters
lived in San Jose, California, with Colonel Coleman Younger, Ringo's
grandfather.

Once, while in the company of Deputy Breakenridge, Ringo pulled a letter
from his pocket and read it with an air of melancholy. He finally told
Breakenridge that the letter was from one of his sisters in California. She
wrote him regularly, thinking he was in the cattle business and doing fine.
Ringo commented sadly that he hoped she never learned the truth about him.

Tombstone tamed down somewhat after the Earps, Sheriff Behan and Deputy
Breakenridge started riding herd on the town. This galled Ringo
considerably. He was fond of the old frontier tradition of wide-open towns,
where a man could drink, shoot up the town if he felt like it, or even kill
with impunity. And the coming of law and order had dimmed Tombstone's
reputation as the toughest town in the southwest.

Ringo blamed Wyatt Earp and his brothers for most of this, and he did not
like them. Curly Bill had killed a marshal and was staying clear of
Tombstone for a time. But Ringo still came regularly. He seemed to consider
himself a champion of the outlaws, and Wyatt Earp the champion of the law
and order crowd. One witness, writing about it later, said: "Everybody in
Tombstone looked for a gunfight every time Ringo rode into town. He would
swagger up and down Allen Street, two ivory-handled guns buckled around his
waist. In winter he wore a huge shaggy buffalo-skin overcoat, with a
six-shooter in each pocket. Any time he saw an Earp on the street he would
stride past and stare them in the eye, as though daring them to say a wrong
word."

There was another band of rustlers working in Cochise County, the Clantons
and the McLowerys. They also hated the Earps and would one day participate
in the famous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, a battle that did not involve
Ringo.

On one particular day in Tombstone, the three Earps and Doc Holliday stood
in front of Bob Hatch's saloon chatting with the mayor of Tombstone. Across
the street before the Grand Hotel were the Clantons and the McLowerys.
Ringo happened along and had an inspiration.

He confronted Marshal Earp with a proposition. Since they hated one
another, there was certain to be a showdown some day soon. So why not now?
Ringo dared Earp to come out into the middle of the street and shoot it
out.

Earp thought Ringo was either drunk or crazy. Either way, he refused to
rise to the bait and went back inside the saloon with his brothers. Doc
Holliday remained, watching Ringo with a cold killer's smile. It was a
well-known fact that Holliday was the deadliest gunfighter and the bravest
of the Earp crowd. So Ringo turned to him, taking a handkerchief from his
pocket. He challenged Holliday to a handkerchief duel. In this sort of
duel, each man takes a corner of the handkerchief in one hand and steps
back to the end of it, usually about three feet. Then, at the word, each
man goes for his gun. At such short range, of course, it is almost
impossible to miss. This was the bloodiest of all gun duels and often
resulted in both men being killed. To accept such a challenge took an icy
courage few men possess.

Doc Holliday accepted the challenge without hesitation. But the duel did
not take place; Mayor Thomas stepped between them to stop it. Ringo had to
walk away, a frustrated man.

What made John Ringo so fearless?

Various reasons have been given for his reckless courage. The one with
probably the most validity has it that Ringo had a strong drive toward
suicide, he deliberately courted death every day of his life. Especially
when drunk, he hated himself for what he had become. And if a man courts
death, why should he fear it? In view of the controversy surrounding his
death, this theory is possibly correct.

Many of the western outlaws were cowards. A number of the famed killers of
the Old West shot as many men from ambush, in the back, as they did face to
face. Yet for others it was a matter of honor to appear fearless, even if
they were quaking with terror inside. They had the image of the fearless
badman to maintain. Since Ringo was quite conscious of this image, it
likely goaded him into deadly situations.

Doc Holliday is also credited with being an absolutely fearless gunfighter.
But he was dying of tuberculosis and knew it, so death held few fears from
him. Ironically, Doc Hoiliday lived through all the violence and bloodshed
and died peacefully in bed, one of the few western badmen to do so.

Ringo had several confrontations with the Earps. One of these became known
as Ringo's Victory at the Charleston bridge. This episode also reveals,
strangely enough, how he always kept his word to the letter.

Shortly after his face-to-face challenge to Wyatt Earp in Tombstone, Ringo
and another man robbed a poker game in a saloon in Galeyville. Both men had
played in the game since morning. At midnight they were broke. They left
the game, got their horses and returned to rob the game of five hundred
dollars. Ringo had followed this pattern before, but his victims usually
laughed it off, afraid to do anything, so Ringo expected no repercussions.

Shortly he was back in Galeyville and was astonished when Deputy
Breakenridge arrived to serve him with a warrant for armed robbery. Ringo
was indignant that his poker-playing friends had lost their sense of humor.
Breakenridge was in a hurry to return to Tombstone, but Ringo had some
business to settle. He told the deputy to return to Tombstone, and he would
follow the instant his affairs were concluded. Breakenridge went on his
way, detouring to attend to some law business. The following day he started
back to Tombstone. He kept expecting Ringo to catch up with him. Noon
passed, and there was no sign of Ringo. Breakenridge experienced some
misgivings about his judgment. Aside from the fact that all of Tombstone
would have the horse laugh on him for allowing an outlaw like Ringo free on
just his word, he knew that Sheriff Behan would be furious.

But Ringo caught up with the deputy before he reached Tombstone. He had
ridden all night to keep his promise.

That evening, in Sheriff Behan's office in Tombstone, a lawyer, Ben
Goodrich, came to post bail for Ringo. From the attorney Ringo learned that
Curly Bill Brocius was accused of robbing a stage at Robber's Roost all by
himself. The Earps knew that Curly Bill was in Charleston, and they planned
to capture him the following day. Ringo realized that his friend would
doubtless be drunk right now on the proceeds of the holdup, easy prey for
the Earps.

Meanwhile, Wyatt Earp had learned that Ringo was in jail. With Ringo locked
up, Earp calculated that the capture of Curly Bill would be easy. He
obtained a promise from the district attorney that Ringo would be kept in
jail twenty-four hours without bail.

But Sheriff Behan had akeady released Ringo on bail, and he was on his way
to Charleston. Again he rode all night.

Around noon the next day Wyatt Earp, his brother, Virgil, and Doc Holliday
rode out of the hills above the San Pedro River and arrived at the bridge
across from Charleston. At the approach to the bridge, they reined up in
astonishment.

On the opposite side of the bridge, John Ringo stood with a rifle pointed
at them. He invited them to cross at their peril. They held a brief
conference. With the surprising appearance of Ringo, they assumed that
Curly Bill had been warned and had fled. Even if not, they knew one, or
perhaps all three, would probably die if they attempted to storm the
bridge. They chose discretion over valor, waved goodbye to Ringo, acceding
him the victory at Charleston bridge, and rode off.

In Tombstone, Sheriff Behan appeared in the district court. The judge
wanted to take up the matter of Ringo's bail. When the sheriff informed him
that Ringo was already free on bail, the judge was furious, telling Sheriff
Behan that the district attorney had refused bail for the outlaw. He
further informed Behan that if Ringo did not appear in court the following
day, the court would hold Behan personally responsible.

Word of Behan's plight reached Charleston. Curly Bill and Ringo decided
that it was their fault Sheriff Behan was in a bind. It was their
responsibility to do something.

The next day Sheriff Behan appeared in court without John Ringo. In the
middle of a tongue-lashing by the judge, Ringo walked into the courtroom
with Deputy Breakenridge, embarrassing the judge, but gratifying a highly
relieved Sheriff Behan.

Since it might seem to some, at this point, that John Ringo was far above
the sordid activities of other western badmen, perhaps the story of what
happened in Skeleton Canon might help to place him in a better perspective.

Skeleton Canon winds through the Peloncillo MountaMs from the Animas Valley
in New Mexico to the San Simon Valley in Arizona. In the 1880's the Animas
Valley was a hangout for outlaws. Curly Bill had a ranch there where he
held stock he had rustled.

A Mexican, one Don Miguel Garcia, often brought a pack train loaded with
Mexican silver up from Mexico to buy trade goods in Tucson. He would
exchange the silver for the goods, slip back across the border without
paying customs duty and profit greatly. On one particular day he led a
train of laden mules through Skeleton Canon. He had nineteen men with him.

Halfway through the canon, the train was ambushed by a dozen outlaws lying
on the canon walls. The ambushers were Curly Bill's men, with John Ringo
second in command. When the bloody massacre was over, nineteen Mexicans lay
dead. One, a youth of sixteen, escaped to tell the tale.

The outlaws went among the dead and wounded strewn along the canon floor,
ordered by Ringo to shoot anyone who was still breathing. Then they rounded
up the mules and divided up $75,000 in Mexican silver. This was good for
weeks of debauchery in Galeyville and Charleston before John Ringo managed
to win much of the silver away from the outlaws at cards.

There were other incidents of a like nature in which Ringo slaughtered and
robbed right along with the other members of the cutthroat crew. He
participated in all such murderous raids without reservation and with
gusto.

Cochise County and Tombstone were growing more peaceful now. Wyatt Earp and
his men reportedly killed Curly Bill because they suspected the outlaw
leader of killing Morgan Earp and wounding Virgil. There were some
conflicting stories about this. Some said that the Earps did not kill Curly
Bill, that he went down into Mexico. For whatever reason, Curly Bill was
never seen again around Tombstone. And not too long after that, the Earps
and Doc Holliday left Tombstone. To many the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
was a slaughter, instead of the fair gunfight the Earps claimed it was, the
Clantons and the McLowerys shot down like dogs. But, again, whatever the
truth about the gunfight, the Earps came in for strong criticism around
Tombstone, and soon left. But then Wyatt Earp always followed the booms. He
had left Dodge City as the city's boom began to ebb, and he may have
foreseen the impending decline of Tombstone.

It was also the beginning of the end for John Ringo. Following Curly Bill's
death or disappearance, he remained in Galeyville and Charleston, but most
of the gang had drifted away or been killed. Ringo spent his time gambling
and drinking heavily, growing steadily more morose.

He also made frequent appearances in Tombstone, free to do pretty much as
he pleased now that Wyatt Earp was gone. On one hot day in July in 1882 he
embarked on a ten-day drinking bout. His drinking companions were Buckskin
Frank Leslie, a bartender and part-time badman around Tombstone, and Billy
Claibourne. Both men later reported that Ringo was more despondent than
they had ever seen him, threatening suicide with almost every breath.

A few days later Ringo rode out of Tombstone with two bottles of whiskey in
his pocket. Leslie and Claibourne followed shortly and the trio met again
in Antelope Springs, nine miles out of Tombstone, and continued their
drinking spree in Jack McCann's saloon. A couple of days later a man named
Bill Sanders met Ringo riding alone near a chain of water holes called the
Tanks. Sanders reported later that Ringo was blind drunk. Three miles
farther on Sanders met Buckskin Frank Leslie, who seemed reasonably sober.
Leslie inquired after Ringo. When Sanders told him where he'd seen Ringo,
Leslie rode hard in that direction.

Deputy Breakenridge also encountered Ringo that day. He tried to get the
outlaw to ride with him to the

Goodrich Ranch. Ringo, drunk and stubborn, refused and rode on his way.
Evidently Breakenridge was the last person to see Ringo alive.

At the mouth of West Turkey Creek Canon, sometimes called Morse's Canon,
stood Coyote Smith's ranch house. Across the creek and some distance from
the ranch house was a great live oak. The oak grew in a rather unusual
formation. It had a short, stump-like central trunk from which sprouted
five other trunks, each as thick as an ordinary tree. The tree was green
all the year round. On the ground, held in position by the five trunks, was
a large rock which formed a rough seat. Many travelers nooned under the
shadowy coolness of the giant oak.

Around noon of the day Ringo was last seen alive, Coyote Smith's wife heard
a single shot from the direction of the tree. She thought someone had shot
a deer and dismissed it.

A teamster, stopping at the tree for lunch the following day, found John
Ringo dead, a single bullet hole in his head. He was seated on the flat
rock, head fallen onto his chest. His six-shooter was in his right hand,
the hammer resting on an empty shell. The other five chambers were unfired.
His coat, boots and horse were missing, and portions of his underwear were
bound around his bare feet. Clearly he had not been robbed, since his other
personal possessions were on him.

It would seem that Ringo had finally carried out his threat and killed
himself. A coroner's jury was convened on the spot and officially declared
his death a suicide. He was buried under the live oak, and the grave can
still be viewed there. There was a report that one of Ringo's sisters had
the body exhumed and shipped to California.

Oldtimers swear that he still lies there.

But was it suicide?

Opinion at the time was sharply divided. Many people believed he was
murdered by Buckskin Frank Leslie. There were rumors, never officially
confirmed, that Leslie boasted around Tombstone of killing Ringo. One
witness who viewed Ringo's body before he was buried said there were no
powder burns around the wound in his temple; therefore it could not have
been suicide. So John Ringo remains an enigma even in death. Ringo has a
further distinction not granted to other western badmen. It is said that
Ringo's ghost walks up and down under the old live oak at night. For years
after his death many people refused to go near the tree at night. Even
today, some familiar with the ghost legend will not venture by the tree
after dark.

It would seem that Ringo's death was a signal for the death of a town. The
Tombstone mines closed down in 1883. Within six weeks Tombstone dwindled
from a town of 6,500 people down to 2,000. By 1900 there were only some six
hundred people still living there, and it was in danger of becoming a ghost
town.

Then a new boom struck Tombstone, if of a different nature.

The Bird Cage Theatre still operates in Tombstone, a city that has been
converted into a Disneyland of the old West at the cost of several million
dollars. The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral still takes place in Tombstone for
the entertainment of the tourist-with actors firing blank cartridges.

If John Ringo's ghost does indeed haunt the old oak tree, one must wonder
with what horror he views what has happened to the "toughest town in the
southwest."

JOHN WESLEY HARDIN : DEADLIEST GUN OF THEM ALL

by Gary Brandner

The Acme Saloon on El Paso's brawling San Antonio Street looked in 1895
much the way it had twenty years earlier in the lawless days following the
Civil War. It was the end of the frontier era, but El Paso, in the far
western tip of Texas, was still a town of gamblers, gunfighters, and girls
of easy virtue.

On a hot August night in that year a man named Henry Brown stood at the bar
under the light of the hanging coal-oil lamps and rolled the dice. His
companion was a slim, sandy-haired man in his early forties with ice-blue
eyes and a heavy moustache. This was John Wesley Hardin, the grimmest
gunman ever to come out of Texas. He had less than an hour to live.

Wes Hardin's life began in Bonham, Texas, in 1853.

He was the son of a minister. Wes was eight years old when the Civil War
began, and by the time he reached his teens the Confederate cause had
drained Texas of its young men. With the end of the war came an influx of
Northerners eager to prey on the defeated South. These were the hated
"carpetbaggers," a contemptuous Southern term implying that all they owned
was carried in their hand luggage of heavy carpeting.

The Texas State Police under the postwar administration was liberally
sprinkled with carpetbaggers and freed slaves. They quickly earned the
hatred of bitter young men like Wes Hardin. When he was fifteen Hardin shot
and killed a black state policeman. It was the first of many notches in the
gun of John Wesley Hardin.

The young killer lit out with the police and Union soldiers after him. He
set up an ambush for the pursuers, killed three soldiers, and got away. He
then threw in with Simp Dixon, one of many outlaw relatives Hardin had
scattered over east Texas. The posse caught up with them in Richland
Bottoms, but Hardin and his cousin were able to shoot their way out of the
trap, each killing a man in the process.

Wes Hardin had now killed five men. And he had just turned sixteen.

After the escape from Richland Bottoms Hardin split up with his cousin and
became a professional gambler. This was essentially his only means of
livelihood for the rest of his life. In the town of Towash Hardin got into
an argument with another gambler named Amos Bradley, who rashly claimed Wes
was dealing from the bottom of the deck. For one of the few times in his
life Hardin was beaten to the draw, and Bradley shoved a derringer into the
boy's stomach and pulled the trigger. These little guns were a gambler's
favorite. They sold for about eight dollars, and fired a .41-caliber
bullet. The derringer's effective range was only 15 or 20 feet, but across
a poker table it was deadly. This one misfired, and Bradley never got a
second chance. Hardin's .45 blew a hole in his throat.

Moving on to Horn Hill, Wes Hardin--gambler, gunfighter, and
killer--reverted briefly to the boy he actually was. He went to the circus,
sneaking in under the tent as have many youngsters before and since. And
like many another youngster, Wes was caught by a guard and marched back
outside. Here the comparison ends. As soon as he was free of the guard's
grasp Hardin whirled and shot the man dead before the astonished eyes of
the crowd.

He left town at a gallop, and did not stop until he reached Kosse, a
hundred miles away. He was still only sixteen, but Wes Hardin's boyhood was
over. In Kosse he went looking for the loudest saloon with the fastest
poker game and the most available women. It was one of the latter that
caused him trouble.

A man named Alan Comstock felt he had a prior claim on the woman Hardin
picked out for himself. Jealousy ate at Comstock until finally he went
looking for the kid who had taken his woman. Hardin was expecting him, and
when Comstock burst through the door of his room, the kid shot him through
the right eye.

Wes traveled next to Waco where he argued with a barber named Huffman over
the purchase of a horse. Feeling he had got the worst of it, Huffman drank
himself into a rage and went after the kid. Hardin was in a saloon dealing
cards when the barber lurched in. He immediately eased the big .45 out of
its holster and laid it in his lap. Huffman stood at the bar, some 12 feet
away from Hardin and shouted at him, finally groping for his gun in a
clumsy draw. Before he had his iron free of leather the young gunman
drilled him through the stomach. The barber died 36 hours later.

Hardin fled Waco with a posse again not far behind. He managed to elude
them, but was captured by the sheriff in Longview. The sheriff deputized a
pair of local toughs, a jailhouse bully named Stokes and a halfbreed named
Smolly, to take the outlaw back to Waco for trial. While in the Longview
jail, however, Hardin managed to buy a smuggled .45 with four cartridges in
the cylinder. It was wintertime when they rode out, and Hardin was able to
hide the gun in his waistband under the heavy overcoat. Once the trio was
outside of town Smolly suggested they shoot the prisoner and go back and
tell the sheriff he made a break for it. Stokes, however, had scruples and
balked at cold-blooded murder.

With Hardin tied on his horse they rode southwest, swimming their horses
across the Sabine River among floating chunks of ice. On the second night
they made an open camp on the snow-covered ground. Stokes went to a nearby
farm to get corn for the horses, leaving Smolly alone with Hardin, who was
untied while in camp. The gunman maneuvered behind Smolly and pulled out
the smuggled .45. At this point, according to Hardin's own account, he
yelled at Smolly to turn around. And maybe he did. The old gunfighters did
have their own rules about backshooting, though they were not always
followed. However it happened, Smolly took three of the four slugs from
Hardin's .45. The fourth misfired. Hardin then helped himself to Smolly's
gun and cartridge belt, saddled the best horse, and rode leisurely off,
confident that Stokes would not give chase without a posse.

The young gunman's plan was to head for Mexico by way of San Antonio and
Laredo. However, he hadn't gone far when he met three state policemen
waiting for him with drawn guns. They disarmed Hardin and began the ride
back to Waco.

That night they made camp in bush country, and because they outnumbered the
outlaw three to one the policemen didn't bother to keep him shackled. They
even let him sleep between two of the officers named Smith and Davis while
the third, Ellis, took the first guard watch.

Wes Hardin pretended to sleep as Smith and Davis unbuckled their gunbelts
and stacked a shotgun and two rifles with their saddles. He watched through
slitted eyes while these two crawled under their blankets and went to
sleep. At about midnight Ellis's head began to nod. Gathering himself,
Hardin sprang up from between the sleeping guards and seized the shotgun
from the stacked arms. As Ellis snapped awake Hardin cut him in two with a
blast from the first barrel. He swung the weapon on the slowly awakening
sleepers and with the second barrel blew Davis to eternity. Snatching up
Ellis's six-shooter, Hardin finished off Smith. In no hurry now, he picked
the best of the rifles, saddles, and horses and rode off to join his outlaw
cousins, the Clements, who had a ranch near Gonzales.

These Clements--Jim, Manning, Gyp, and Joe--were killers all who shared
Wes's hatred of the state police. They invited their cousin to join them in
a cattle drive up the old Chisolm Trail to Abilene. Hardin took them up on
it, figuring Kansas was as good a place as Mexico to lie low while things
cooled off in Texas.

Before they got underway Hardin rode into Gonzales for a little action. He
won a bundle at poker, then lost it at monte. He decided the Mexican dealer
was a cheat, and slapped him across the face with his left hand while going
for his gun with the right. The bullet caught the dealer under the rib cage
and came out just below his left shoulder blade. The town marshal, knowing
Hardin was a cousin of the formidable Clements, made no move to arrest him.
Gonzales was a town where the shooting of a Mexican monte dealer could be
overlooked in the general hubbub.

The cattle drive north was uneventful, except for the shooting of a couple
of Indians by Hardin when they tried to levy a tax on the cows being driven
over their land. In those days the killings of Indians, Negroes, and
Mexicans were not even added to a gunfighter's score. This was not racial
bias so much as recognition that such victims were usually poorly armed and
unskilled in gun handling.

Things continued calmly then until they reached Newton Prairie where
another herd moved up, crowding the Clements from behind. These cattle were
the long-legged, mean-tempered longhorns, not the placid herefords of
today. It didn't take much to spook these beasts into a stampede, something
all cowboys dreaded. Hardin rode back to the following trail boss, a man
named Jose Guzman, and suggested he hold up his herd. Guzman did not like
Hardin's tone nor his words, and opened up on him with a .44-caliber Henry
rifle. When the rifle jammed Guzman drew his six-shooter and galloped at
Hardin, firing as he came. On this occasion Hardin was poorly armed. He
carried an old cap-and-ball .36 Navy Colt that was in poor repair. To keep
the chambers in alignment he had to grip the cylinder with his hand. Firing
in this clumsy manner Hardin managed to hit the trail boss in the thigh,
giving him time to get another gun and do the job right.

The cattle were delivered to Abilene without further mishap. Hardin and the
Clements had been a hundred days on the trail, and they were rip-roaring
ready for some fun. And Abilene was ready to provide it. Plenty of booze
and babes and games of chance waited in the prairie city for the lusty
trail hands eager to spend their pay. But in spite of all the hell-raising,
lawlessness was kept to a minimum in Abilene by the man who was the
marshal--Wild Bill Hickok. Wild Bill strictly enforced the ordinance
against shooting off guns in town, even if he had to kill a man to do it.

In Wes Hardin's autobiography he tells of an encounter with Wild Bill when
the marshal tried to disarm the outlaw. He unholstered his guns, says
Hardin, and offered them butt-first to the lawman, keeping his forefingers
hooked under the trigger guards. When Hickok reached for the weapons Hardin
wheeled the barrels forward, letting the butts smack into his hands in the
"border roll." It is doubtful that Wild Bill would have fallen for a trick
like this, and even more doubtful that Hardin with the drop on Hickok would
have refrained from killing him. Nevertheless, that's the way Wes says it
was, and it could have happened.

Though he never faced Hickok in a showdown, the eighteen-year-old Wes
Hardin managed to get into mischief aplenty in Abilene. He spent a lot of
time with the floozies at the Drover's Cottage and in the card game down at
the Bull's Head Saloon. At the Bull's Head a man named Tatum made the
mistake of reaching across a poker table to slap the skinny looking lad
during an argument. The six-shooter in Hardin's lap roared under the table,
shooting Tatum in the thigh and severing the femoral artery. The man bled
to death in twenty minutes.

Figuring he was now in big trouble if Wild Bill came to investigate the
gunfire, Hardin lit out for the Clements camp at Cottonwood. From there he
joined up with a posse chasing a killer named Pablo Gutierrez. They caught
up with the fugitive at Bluff, Kansas, where Hardin shot and killed him.
Thinking that this public service would even things up for the killing of
Tatum, he rode back into Abilene where, sure enough, Wild Bill chose to
ignore him.

But John Wesley Hardin could not stay out of trouble for long. Asleep one
night in the Drover's, he was awakened by a thief quietly going through his
clothes. Hardin slipped the .45 from beneath his pillow and shot the thief
through the neck at close range. Remembering the anti-gunfire ordinance,
Hardin rushed to the window just in time to see Wild Bill pull up with four
other men in a hack. Not pausing to retrieve his pants, which had fallen
under the dead man, Hardin scrambled through the window, dropped to the
alley below, and ran pantless for the city limits. He got a ride with a
passing cowboy back to the Clements camp, and never again went into
Abilene.

The outlaw rode back into Texas where he had a run-in with a pair of state
policemen at a trading post. While one officer waited outside the other
covered Hardin and demanded his six-shooter. Again Hardin offered his gun
butt-first and executed the border roll. This time, more in character, Wes
finished the trick by shooting the policeman in the face. The second lawman
took off at the sound of the shot, having no doubt that it was his fellow
officer and not Wes Hardin who had gone down.

A posse trailed Hardin for three days after this shooting. He finally lay
in ambush for them, possibly with help from the Clements, and three of the
possemen were killed, discouraging further pursuit.

At this point in his life, in spite of being a wanted killer with a fistful
of warrants out for him, John Wesley Hardin fell in love and married.
Little is known of his bride other than her name, Jane, and the fact that
she died childless while Wes was in prison. They bought a small place near
Gonzales and Wes had a shot at farming and ranching on a small scale. It
was during this time, possibly to relieve the boredom of domestic life,
that Hardin developed his holster-vest.

At the end of the Civil War men of both armies carried their revolvers in
flap-top holsters, butt to the front, on the right side of their waistbelt.
A more awkward position for a quick draw would be hard to devise. The Army
draw was made with the back of the hand against the side, bringing the gun
out with a lift-twist that swiveled the barrel up and across the stomach.
After the war the young veterans continued for a time to carry their guns
this way, though they did dispose of the cumbersome holster flaps.

Before long it was discovered that reversing the guns so the butts pointed
back made for a more natural draw. Gunfighters then began dropping the
holsters lower on their legs so the butt rested nearer the hanging hand.
Others used the cross-draw, keeping the guns at waist level, butt forward,
but reaching across the body to draw with the opposite hand instead of
using the wrist-wrenching Army draw. Northern gunfighters generally
preferred the cross-draw because in the colder climates where a coat was
needed much of the time it was easier to yank out a gun from the left than
to dig up under the coat skirt on the right.

There were pistoleros who carried their weapons in shoulder holsters,
pants-pocket holsters, even boot holsters. The rig Wes Hardin is credited
with inventing was a calfskin vest with a leather lined pocket on each side
to hold a pair of short-barreled .41s with the butts pointing in, nestled
against the lower ribs. Wearing this outfit under a coat Hardin could draw
from an innocent looking folded-arm position, giving him the double
advantage of speed and surprise.

It wasn't long before the holster-vest got a workout. Hardin tired of
farming and hit the saddle for Kingsville and the lower Rio Grande country.
In the brush land south of San Antonio a Mexican with robbery on his mind
rode into Hardin's camp. Suspicious of the man from the start, Hardin
deliberately took off his gunbelt and hung it up with the weapon still
holstered. Thinking he had the advantage, the Mexican went for his gun and
Hardin whipped out a vest-pocket .41 and killed him.

Some months later back in Gonzales Wes Hardin, for one of the few times in
his life, came out second best in a gunfight. A game of ten-pins with a man
named Dudley Sublett led to a quarrel, a fistfight, and finally gun play.
Subtett took a .41 slug in the shoulder, but Hardin was shot through the
body. The Clements hustled him out of town, but the news that Hardin was
badly wounded seemed to inspire the state police to greater efforts to
catch him.

When they finally came upon his hideout two policemen advanced on Hardin
with drawn guns. Hardin killed one of them and wounded the other, but one
of their bullets shattered his knee. Wes would have died before letting the
despised state police take him, but he agreed to surrender to Sheriff Dick
Regan, a man he trusted. As Regan rode in to take the prisoner one of his
possemen got nervous and fired his gun, hitting Hardin in the thigh.

Regan loaded the shot-up gunfighter on a pallet in the back of a spring
wagon for the trip to Austin where he was jailed. After some months he was
returned to Gonzales to stand trial. By then Hardin had recovered from his
three bullet wounds, and he bribed somebody--the jailer or the local
sheriff--to let him escape.

He hadn't been free long before Hardin went on another drinking spree in
another saloon and killed another man--this one an old antagonist named Pat
Morgan. Sheriff Jack Helms came after Hardin, and instead of running this
time Wes waited for the sheriff and killed him. This brought Brown County
Deputy Sheriff Charley Webb into the action.

Webb and Hardin had supported different sides in the bitter Texas feud
between the Sutton and Taylor families. This probably had as much to do
with Webb's determination as did any thought of avenging Sheriff Helms. He
followed Hardin to the town of Comanche, vowing to bring the outlaw back in
irons or in a box. In the Ace of Diamonds Saloon the two came together.

Hardin, apparently unarmed, spoke a few words to Webb, then turned to order
a drink. Webb reached for his gun, and Bud Dixon, another of Hardin's
endless supply of no-good cousins, shouted a warning. Hardin jumped aside
as the deputy's bullet grazed his ribs. He drew from his holster-vest and
killed Webb with a single shot. This would be the killing for which Wes
Hardin was at last convicted.

Things finally became too hot in Texas, and Hardin left his home state for
stops in Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida. He lived under the name of John
Adams and did a little farming, bought and sold several saloons, and
gambled. If Hardin killed anybody during his three years away from Texas,
nobody knows about it.

Hardin was tracked down by Lt. John Armstrong of the Texas Rangers, which
had replaced the discredited state police. With the help of Dallas
detective John Duncan, Armstrong traced Hardin to a little town in Alabama.
There they discovered that the gunman and some of his friends were headed
for Pensacola. Armstrong arranged for the Pensacola police to be waiting
with him and Duncan when Hardin's train arrived at a watering stop just
outside the city. The plan was for Armstrong to enter the front of Hardin's
coach and throw down on him while the Florida officers rushed in from the
rear. Detective Duncan was to stand on the platform and reach through the
window to grab Hardin's gun arm.

Things didn't work out according to plan. For one reason or another the
Pensacola police failed to make their entrance at the rear of the coach,
and Duncan never got close to Hardin's window. This left Lt. Armstrong to
face five armed men by himself. When he swung into the coach Hardin
immediately recognized the .45 with the 7╜-inch barrel as a Texas weapon,
and went for his own gun. This day Hardin was not wearing the holster-vest,
and had his six-shooter stuck in his waistband. As he pulled at the gun the
hammer caught in his suspenders, getting more firmly entangled the harder
Wes yanked at it.

Meanwhile, one of Hardin's companions drew and fired at Armstrong, missing.
The Ranger dropped him with a bullet through the heart.

Armstrong then rushed at Hardin, who was still tugging frantically at his
revolver, and bashed him over the head with the barrel of his .45. Hardin
went down and out. When Armstrong turned his gun toward the remaining three
men they dropped their weapons and raised their hands.

This time Wes Hardin was in custody for keeps. He was tried in Comanche
with the Texas Rangers on hand to discourage any attempt by his relatives
to free him. The jury found him guilty and he was sent to Huntsville
Prison. After serving 20 years of a 25-year sentence he was pardoned by the
governor.

Hardin tried to return to Gonzales, but he saw that old enmities still
simmered there that could easily get him into a fight and back to prison.
He headed for El Paso, a tough, wide-open honkytonk town that fit Wes
Hardin like a glove.

He took up there with a big blonde known as Mrs. McRose. No delicate
prairie flower was Mrs. McRose. She liked to drink and gamble as well as
Wes. Their life together rocked along without major mishap until the middle
of August, 1895. About that time Wes made a trip down to Pecos, and while
he was gone Mrs. McRose got liquored up and had herself a good time out on
the street shooting at signs, storefronts, and an occasional passerby. She
was arrested, cuffed around a little, and tossed into the city jail by
Young John Selman, an El Paso policeman. He was called Young John to
distinguish him from Old John Selman, his father and a tough old buzzard
who had weathered many a gunfight himself.

When Hardin returned to El Paso he was boiling mad at the treatment of his
lady. Although at 42 he was beginning to have middle-age doubts about his
gun handling skills, he let it be known that he was ready to kill Young
John Selman and his father to boot if the old man interfered.

On the night of August 19, Wes ran into Old John outside the Acme Saloon.
He told the old man that his son would have to answer for his treatment of
Mrs. McRose, though Wes added that he was unarmed at the time. Hardin
probably meant the first part of his statement, but the last was a lie, for
under his coat he wore the famous holster-vest with a pair of loaded .41s.

Hardin walked on into the saloon and ordered drinks for himself and an
acquaintance, Henry Brown. The two men called for the dice and rolled them
on the bar. According to Henry Brown's later testimony, the last mortal
words of John Wesley Hardin were, "Four sixes to beat..."

Old John Selman walked into the saloon behind Hardin. He glided up to
within arm's length, then pulled out his .45 and shot the Texas gunman in
the back of the head. As Hardin crumpled to the floor Selman put two more
bullets into the body.

At the trial Old John Selman's was the only testimony that claimed he was
facing Hardin at the time he fired. The coroner found that all three
bullets had entered from the rear, and that's the way the other witnesses
saw it. Still, Hardin's threats against the Selmans, plus his reputation as
a gunfighter and killer were enough to sway the jury. Old John Selman was
acquitted to be gunned down not long afterward himself.

The actual number of men he killed will never be known for sure, but they
number somewhere between thirty and forty, making John Wesley Hardin the
deadliest gun of them all.



BEN THOMPSON : THE TEXAS TERROR

by Arthur Moore

The brawling, sprawling Texas of the mid-nineteenth century was rich in
living legends of gamblers and gunfighters. Gambling was as respected an
occupation as store-tending or any other frontier calling. Gunslinging was
respectable depending on which side of the law a man found himself, and the
gunslinger was respected in direct proportion to his ability. Ben Thompson
combined a talent at cards and dice with a marvelous skill in handling a
pistol to become one of the most famous and feared gunfighters of his time.

His reputation was well-earned and widespread. His friends claimed he was
loyal and could be counted on when he was needed; his enemies called him a
coldblooded killer. No one disputed his courage and coolness in the face of
danger.

Thompson was born in 1842 and grew up in the area where he later made his
name. There's some question as to whether he was actually born in Texas,
but his family moved to Austin when Ben was still a young child.

Austin in 1850 was an outpost of civilization. It was a dusty little town
of dirt streets and clapboard or mud and shake houses, many with
hard-packed dirt floors and oiled paper windows. Wagons and buckboards rode
with armed guards or escorts when they ventured outside of town. Apaches
and the dreaded Comanches roamed the countryside in constant lookout for
guns and horses. The Indians often swooped down on settlers and even raided
houses on the outskirts of Austin.

These were frontier times and people were guided by a very practical set of
mores. When danger threatened, a man went for his gun and did his own
fighting. Women and children fought when necessary. No one thought of
calling the law or suing a Comanche war party in court.

Ben Thompson got into his first shooting scrape when he was fifteen. It
started as a fist fight, but the other boy was bigger and Ben got the worst
of it. Bloody and beaten, he ran home for something that would even the
odds--his single barreled shotgun. When he returned, the older and wiser
lad headed for the horizon but stopped some birdshot along the way. He
recovered, but Ben was freed and warned about using his gun for such
purposes.

As a boy in his teens, Ben was expected to contribute to the support of his
family. His first job was distributing type in a newspaper office. He went
on to work as a typesetter in print shops and newspaper offices for a
number of years. He might have done well in this occupation except for two
things. One was the considerable natural skill he had with guns and his
quickness to use them in settling arguments. The other was that somewhere
along the trail in his early years he also discovered the pleasures and
excitement of gambling.

Cards were more fascinating than the newspaper office and promised richer
rewards. Ben soon gave up his job and became a full time gambler, a
vocation he followed the rest of his life. And gambling gave young Thompson
plenty of opportunity to practice his marksmanship. By the time he was in
his early twenties his reputation had begun to grow.

He was well aware of his prowess and he took advantage of it. He never
backed down from a fight and he often went looking for trouble. He never
hesitated to kill if his adversary was armed, since to hesitate could cost
a gunman his life. Despite modern television and the movies, gunmen of the
early West never shot guns out of an enemy's hand. To do so would be
soft-hearted or stupid. Ben Thompson was neither.

He feared nothing. One of his most remarkable traits was his courage and
steadiness under fire. When the odds against him were greatest he seemed at
his calmest. Of himself, Thompson said: "l always make it a rule to let the
other fellow fire first. If a man wants a fight I argue the question with
him and try to show him it is foolish. If he can't be dissuaded, why the
fun begins, but I let him have first crack. Then when I fire, you see, I
have the verdict of self defense on my side, for he is pretty certain in
his hurry to miss, and I never do."

Ben's enemies claimed this statement had a high manure content and was
strictly for publication. There were, they said, instances when the dead
man at Ben's feet had not fired his weapon at all. But even so, there was
some truth in Ben's words and they were clear evidence of his calm approach
to snuffing out another's life.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861 young Ben turned his enthusiasms to a
new cause. He went to San Antonio and enlisted in the cavalry of the
Confederate Army. At this time he was a young, blue-eyed lad with a strong
jaw and thick black hair. Slender and well-built, he was a fine horseman as
well as an expert marksman. As was common, he furnished his own horse and
equipment.

But his record with the Confederate States of America is in some doubt. Ben
did not take well to discipline and his rebellion against it sometimes put
him in the guardhouse. He smuggled whiskey and tobacco to fellow troopers;
he gambled and entered into military life with the same boisterous
exuberance that he had always felt as a civilian. He did nothing to
distinguish himself as a soldier and he never came close to any of the
great battles of the war.

He was transferred to a cavalry regiment whose job it was to patrol the
Mexican border. Riding along the sandy Rio Grande was dull work, with
nothing to relieve the monotony. It didn't suit Ben at all. He wanted
excitement and action. When the war didn't provide it, he made some of his
own.

He received permission to go to Laredo, which was a bustling town of
stores, saloons and gambling halls just across the river in Old Mexico. The
first thing he did was find himself a monte game with a crowd of Mexican
soldiers. According to Ben's version of the story later, Lady Luck was
riding with him and he won the soldiers' cash and when that ran out, their
revolvers which were as good as money.

Ben insisted the game was all fair and honest in true gambling style. The
unhappy soldiers took a somewhat different view, and when Ben closed the
proceedings and tried to leave with his winnings, they claimed the game had
been crooked and demanded back guns and money. A soldier attempted to snuff
out the candles to plunge the room in darkness. Ben started firing. His
first shots dropped two of the yelling soldiers and started a panic toward
the doors. Thompson plunged into the crowd and managed to escape in the
confusion, but not without a few shots coming close enough to rip off his
shirttails.

Ben wisely vacated that part of the country quickly and joined a regiment
under Colonel Beard at Austin which was trying to put down troublesome
Indians. He was put in charge of recruiting a company of men for the fight,
but the war ended before the regiment was sent out on its mission. Suddenly
Ben Thompson found himself a civilian again.

The great Civil War was over in the United States, but another rebellion
was underway south of the border. While the attentions and armies of the
North Americans had been focused on internal problems, Napoleon III of
France took advantage of the southern, neighboring country and established
an empire in Mexico. He put Archduke Maximilian of Austria, and his wife,
Carlotta, on the newly-created and somewhat shaky throne. French
speculators poured into Mexico to exploit its resources.

With the end of the Civil War the United States began to look south and
announced a readiness to enforce the Monroe Doctrine. The American
President ordered the corrupt Imperial government to clear out of Mexico
and sent battle veterans marching toward the border. Napoleon, already in
trouble at home, did not have the means to support Maximilian--thousands of
miles away. He invented a flimsy financial quarrel with the luckless
Maximilian and left him to face the music on his own. Maximilian chose to
fight for his toppling throne.

It was a most difficult fight. Maximilian was hardpressed for money and
men. Mexicans everywhere were rising in revolt. The Emperor's agents
hurried into Texas in an attempt to tap the reservoir of trained manpower
of the now-defunct Confederate Army. These agents offered Confederate
veterans gold if they would fight for Maximilian.

Many southern soldiers had not surrendered, but merely turned around and
gone home after General Lee gave up at Appomattox. Most had returned to
find hardship at home; Texas was very poor and was now governed by a rag
tag Union Army--not the battle veterans of the war. Some Texan hotheads
were still bitter about the war and still full of frustration because it
was now against the law to shoot Yankees. The Austrian's gold appealed to
these as a way to solve several problems at the same time.

Ben Thompson went south. He was given the rank of Lieutenant and entered
into a far different and more dangerous life than he had known in the
Confederate Army. Maximilian's war was bloody and vicious, with every man
pressed constantly into battle. It was very unlike the dreary border
patrols he'd ridden in Texas. He had the chance to fight, and fight he did.
Maximilian himself is said to have remarked that no other officer in his
service possessed Thompson's daring.

But Ben was not in the war because of any belief in the Imperialist cause.
And he did not change his way of thinking or acting. He continued to gamble
and to try to line his own pockets. Once he and his men captured a wagon
train of supplies and livestock and, instead of turning them over to the
Emperor, headed them north to the Rio Grande and put them in the hands of a
rancher with instructions for the man to sell the train and deposit the
money to Ben's account in a San Antonio bank. The rancher agreed, but rode
out of Ben's life forever. War is hell.

When Maximilian was finally captured, tried and shot by the Mexican
patriots in 1867, Ben Thompson fled to Vera Cruz and escaped. He eventually
made his way home to Texas.

In 1871, Ben turned up in the booming cow town of Abilene, Kansas. Abilene
was the first of a long string of famous cow towns. It was the first Kansas
railroad town to receive Texas longhorns which had been driven up the
Chisholm Trail. The railroad had been built from St. Louis, through
Sedalia, and on to the prairie. Beef could now be shipped east from the
range lands. This idea helped change a nation.

Abilene was a wide-open town, muzzle-full of gamblers and cowboys, primed
with painted women, and loaded with buyers from the East with money to
spend. Keeping any kind of law and order required a strong hand, and Wild
Bill Hickok was appointed town marshal.

James Butler Hickok was the most famous gunslinger alive at the time. He
had a few years more to live.

In Abilene, Ben and another gambler, Phil Coe, opened the Bull's Head
Saloon. It did well and so did the owner's gambling interests. The only
thorn in Ben's side was the town marshal. First off, Hickok was a Yankee
which put him and Ben at odds. Too, Hickok took his job seriously and often
interfered in disputes that Ben felt he had no business in. Ben raged that
Hickok was a strutting Yankee who was pushing Texas cowboys around... which
was partly true. He urged John Wesley Hardin, called Little Seven-Up,
another notorious gambler and gunslick, to shoot Hickok. Hardin, who had no
part in the private feud between the two men, told Thompson to kill Hickok
himself. But even Ben was not foolhardy enough to try. He left Abilene
without killing anyone.

Two years later he and his younger brother Billy were in Ellsworth, Kansas,
where the cattle trade had shifted as the railroad built farther West. Ben
took up gambling in the back room of Brennan's Saloon and did a thriving
business. Unlike Abilene, Ellsworth's town marshal became a good friend of
Thompson's. Sheriff Chauncey B. Whitney of Ellsworth County was also city
marshal, and he handled complaints fairly.

The most common "crimes" in a cow town were violations of drunk and
disorderly or deadly weapons ordinances. For a man to shoot a signboard
full of holes or fire a few letting-off-steam shots for the hell of it,
might cost him a fine of ten dollars. To shoot someone who was shooting at
him might cost nothing at all. These rules were flexible. A man on trial
for murder was often permitted to wear his six-gun in court. He was
innocent till proved guilty. The big difference was between an ordinary
shooting scrape and murder. It was considered justifiable homicide to shoot
a man who was armed and shooting back. Such killings might never to to
trial. But to kill an unarmed man or to shoot or stab someone in the back
was another matter--one that usually resulted in a very short trial and a
long rope.

Ben Thompson's trouble in Ellsworth came as a result of an argument over a
gambling debt. Ben tipped off a gambler named Jonn Sterling that a third
man needed a backer in a high-stakes game. Sterling promised Ben half his
winnings in exchange, but when he pocketed a thousand dollars, Sterling
walked out of the saloon and conveniently forgot the promise. Ben did not.
He met Sterling in the street, ready to fight it out. The fracas attracted
a good deal of attention, including Ben's brother, Billy, who came out of
the saloon packing Ben's double-barreled shotgun. The gun went off, and the
yelling began. Sheriff Whitney tried to quiet the disturbance. He actually
got Ben to put up his pistol and return to Brennan's Saloon, but when
someone shouted that Sterling and his pals were coming with guns, Billy
whirled and fired. The buckshot caught Sheriff Whitney in the arm, shoulder
and chest. He died of the injuries three days later.

Ben got Billy out of town fast. Sheriff Whitney was well liked, a fact that
a jury might consider more important than Billy's pleas of accidental
shooting. Charges against Ben were dropped for his part in the affair, but
Billy remained a wanted man. When he was finally tried, years later, he
beat the rope on grounds that he had been shooting at someone else, not
Whitney.

Ben moved back to Austin and took up gambling again. But it was impossible
for him to stay out of trouble. He butted into a quarrel between Mark
Wilson, owner of the local Variety Theatre, and another man. The angry
Wilson told Ben it was not his fight and to mind his own business. Ben did
not take kindly to this and hot words were exchanged. Wilson armed himself
with a shotgun and fired at Ben, but missed. Ben drew his pistol and killed
Wilson. A bartender, trying to help Wilson, fired at Ben but only grazed
his hip. Ben shot the man dead. Theatre patrons exited by doors and
windows, tearing down scenery and drapes in their efforts to avoid slugs.

The man who had started the trouble by arguing with Wilson was fined twelve
dollars. A jury returned a verdict of not guilty on Ben Thompson.

At this time Thompson was fairly well-to-do. He owned the Iron Front Saloon
on Congress Street and dressed in fashionable clothes, complete with plug
hat and cane. He had a family and a fine home. But he was an adult
delinquent. Sober, he was polite and gallant, especially toward women. He
was a good talker, considered handsome, and had many friends in high
places. With liquor in him, he was about as responsible as a slavering wolf
among the sheep.

In 1879, in a roaring mining camp in Leadville, Colorado, Ben got into a
faro game and lost about three thousand dollars. He announced that he had
been cheated, pulled his pistol and shot out the lights. The crowd
scattered, whereupon Ben calmly picked up the cash from the table. He
sauntered across the street to another bar and remarked that there seemed
to be some disturbance across the way.

Shortly after this he also put himself into the railroad war between the
Santa Fe and the Rio Grande lines. The fight was over a strategic pass both
companies needed. Ben did plenty of shooting, but also got himself thrown
into jail. When the lines ran out of money, the war was over and Ben headed
for Austin again.

He took part in so many gunfights and shooting sprees and came out alive
that he began to get the idea he was bulletproof. The myth spread that he
was immune to lead poisoning and lived a charmed life. On at least one
occasion he was persuaded to doff his coat and prove that he did not wear a
steel vest.

He was charged with some shootings that he vigorously denied. With his
hotheadedness, it is more than likely he also got into fights and killed
men he never talked about. He sometimes drank too much; he was fond of
shooting out street lamps in Austin while in his cups. Wily he was never
hunted dorm and killed by his enemies while he was drunk is a mystery. But
it may well be that they considered him deadly dangerous. drunk or sober.

Thompson had courage and was not afraid to face another man's gun. There
were many eyewitnesses to his shootings, and even his worst eneinies never
accused him of running away. In the Old West it was considered suicide to
have it out with Ben Thompson.

Bat Masterson, the famous gunslinger who managed somehow to cheat Dodge
City's Boot Hill and lived to become a New York City sports writer in later
years, wrote of Thompson: "He killed many men but always in an open and
manly way. The men he shot and killed were men who tried to kill him."

Ben put on weight in middle age and became pale and flabby. He took to
dressing in black and wearing silk hats, but he still loved a good fight.
According to a newspaper story, a young eastern dude, wearing more shooting
irons than necessary, showed up in Austin and announced he would ventilate
any gent in a plug hat. Ben heard this, donned his top hat and went looking
for the dude. When the easterner reached for his pistol, Ben pretended
fright and begged for mercy. The dude drew, but Ben's pistol appeared like
magic and bullets blasted the loudmouth off his pins. It was Thompson's
kind of joke.

As a gambling hall operator, Ben came in contact with many well-placed
people. Some of them persuaded him to run for office, and he became marshal
of Austin. The position seemed to settle him and he did not shoot up men or
saloons for about a year. He was considered by many as one of the best
marshals the town ever had.

In his job as marshal, Ben went to San Antonio to bring back a wanted man.
While he was there he visited the Variety Theatre, a rowdy night spot on
the main plaza, now run by one-armed Jack Harris, Billy Sims and Joe
Foster. Thompson and Harris were enemies of long standing; Ben had once run
Billy Sims out of town; he had once called Joe Foster a cheat and
threatened to kill him.

Jack Harris declared publicly that Ben Thompson was not welcome at the
Variety, so of course Ben went there.

The two men had words through an open window. Harris was packing a shotgun
and when he raised it as if to fire, Ben shot him. Thompson was taken into
custody when Harris died. Before the trial he resigned as marshal of
Austin.

The verdict was not guilty. Ben returned to Austin, but it was the
beginning of the end. He was not the important man he once was. All he had
!eft were his pistol and his temper. He drank heavily and, when he couldn't
sleep at night, took to prowling the streets shooting out gas lights. The
police avoided and ignored him whenever possible.

He died with his boots on in San Antonio in 1884. It happened at the same
Variety Theatre where he had killed Harris and was probably an offshoot of
the first killing. Thompson and a friend, J. King Fisher, a gunman of no
mean ability and then deputy sheriff of Uvalde County, went to the theatre
to see the show.

Sims and Foster were still operating the house since the death of Harris.
Ben and Joe Foster got into an argument. Billy Sims and a special policeman
named Jacob Coy were nearby. No one knows for sure how the gunplay started,
but in its wake Coy was wounded, Foster was shot in the leg and later died
of the wound, King Fisher and Ben Thompson fell dead.

There was talk of ambush--and still is. A postmortem examination showed
that Ben had been shot nine times! Five of the bullets were from different
guns. Fisher had been shot thirteen times.

So Ben Thompson died by violence, the way he had lived. He left nothing
behind but a legend and a reputation, but he was an unusual product of a
raw and unsettled age. He was a genuine part of the life and color of a
time that can never exist again in the world.

SAM BASS : ROBBER

by Chet Cunningham

President Rutherford B. Hayes had scarcely settled into his new quarters in
the White House after his inauguration on March 4, 1877, when one of the
slickest outlaws of the Old West pulled a six-gun in his first
holdup--which turned out to be a total and complete disaster.

Sam Bass was the man with the new, untried Colt .44. He stood only five
feet eight inches and weighed 140 pounds. Like many men of his day he wore
a carefully trimmed handlebar moustache.

Sam and three men decided to rob the stage coach coming from Cheyenne,
Wyoming, when it came within two miles of Deadwood in Dakota Territory.

Joel Collins planned the robbery, and used Sam, Frank Towle and Little
Reddy McKimmie. They would stop the stage, disarm the passengers, check and
see what was in the strong box and relieve the passengers of anything of
value.

The date was March 25, 1877. Everything went wrong from the start. They
spotted the stage, got ready and even challenged it. But the man assigned
to stop the horses, Frank Towle, didn't do his job. A shot was fired and
the horses spooked, breaking into a run along the rough stage coach trail.

McKimmie raised his shotgun and fired, killing the stage driver, Johnny
Slaughter, who tumbled off the high seat. That was all the horses needed.
They broke in panic and charged down the road at runaway speed, taking the
$15,000 stored in the strong box with them. At last a passenger caught the
reins and brought the stage into Deadwood.

Sam Bass sat on his horse disgusted, and promised himself he would never
make those mistakes again.

Robert McKimmie was booted out of the gang for his stupid killing of the
driver and the group expanded to include Jack Davis, Jim Berry, Tom Nixon
and Bill Heftridge.

The very next robbery the group tried was a success. They hit another
stage, this one going from the mines into Deadwood. Sam hoped it would be
loaded with Black Hills gold. No record was kept as to how the men split
the loot--which turned out to be exactly seven dollars.

Late in August of the same year the gang had made seven stage robberies,
with $30 their biggest haul. It was then that they turned their attention
to trains. Joel Collins was leader of the bandit band as it rode south deep
into the state of Nebraska to Ogallala. A site was chosen, the water
station at Big Springs, a few miles from Ogallala. Collins knew this area
well from previous experience.

Perhaps Collins had learned something from the success of Sitting Bull and
his Sioux warriors at the Battle of the Little Big Horn the sumer before.
This time the robbery was planned carefully, and carried out with
precision.

Number Four express on the Union Pacific line was due at the water tank at
10:48 on September 18, 1877. Thirty minutes before that time the six gang
members entered the small station house and forced the agent, George
Barnhart, to tear out the telegraph key and put out a red light on the
tracks so the train would stop.

When the train huffed to a halt, Collins and Heffridge ordered the engineer
and the fireman down from the cab. The bandits bluffed their way into the
express car and made their first big haul--S60,000 in newly minted 1877
twenty-dollar gold pieces in three wax-sealed wooden boxes.

They tried to chop their way into the safe with an axe but couldn't get it
open--and passed up another $200,000 worth of cash. As an afterthought, the
men went through the passenger coaches robbing the travelers of another
$1,300.

It was the biggest haul that Sam Bass was ever to make himself or
participate in. It was a fortune. They moved the train on down the tracks
toward Ogallala, and rode to the South Platte fiver where they buried the
loot. Two hours later they came into Ogallala trail-weary and looking for a
drink. The town hardly noticed them, buzzing with talk of the train
robbery. No suspicion came upon Sam or the men, so they returned to the
cache and split the money, each man getting over $10,200.

Money was hard to come by in Nebraska during its first year of statehood,
1877. On the surrounding cattle ranches, cow punchers worked for $25 a
month and board and room. All year a cowboy slaved for only $300. The
Nebraska dirt farmers seldom saw $25 in cold cash money all in one piece.

Yet six nondescript outlaws had just walked off with $10,200 each, more
money than a cow puncher would earn in 33 years of riding the range!

The men split up. Bass and Davis moved on south to Fort Worth, Texas, the
area that Sam called home.

Sam Bass did not look like the popular idea of an outlaw of the Old West.
He was born July 21, 1851 on a farm near Mitchell, Indiana, one of ten
children. His mother died when he was ten and his father three years later.
When Sam was nineteen he went to Texas where he could satisfy his yearning
to be a cowboy.

Sam landed at Denton Creek ranch, fourteen miles from Denton, Texas and
fifteen north of Fort Worth. After a year on the farm he moved into Denton
because he liked the town life better, and got a job as stable hand at a
hotel.

In 1872 Denton was a village, a raw-boned, rough and rugged frontier town.
Sam was on his own, out from under the harsh, unloving care of his uncle
and ready to taste life. His new friends were rough. He acquired a taste
for whiskey and gambling. Sam dressed carelessly, and often went a week
without shaving. Some say he walked in a perpetual slouch.

A modern psychiatrist would have a fine time with Sam Bass, pointing out
his industrious and hard working parents, who were suddenly taken away, and
the resulting insecurity which fell over him and lasted the rest of his
life.

A racehorse track in Denton soon caught Sam's fancy, and every Sunday he
was there wagering with what little money he had. Soon he became so
interested in racing that he scraped up money and with a partner bought a
horse to race.

Sam had quit the stable and begun work for William F. Egan on his 12 acre
ranch near town. But soon Sam's racing activities took up so much of his
time that Egan told Sam to quit racing or quit his job. Sam quit the job.

He named the horse Jenny and she kept winning races. Soon Sam bought out
his partner, and quickly the horse's fame spread. She became known as the
Denton Mare and he raced all comers, winning all but one race. Sam began to
get reckless, gambled with cards and drank heavily. Benton's rougher
element seemed to be attracted to Sam.

Later Sam and a new friend, Henry Underwood, took the Denton Mare into
Indian Territory just to the north in what is now the state of Oklahoma.
Sam raced and won against Indian horses, but the Choctaws and Cherokees
refused to give up the horses they had wagered. Later that night Sam and
some of his friends helped themselves to twice as many horses as the
Indians had bet. The pair drove the animals to San Antonio and sold them.

It was near the end of 1875 when Sam left Denton the next time. An argument
on the street led to a rock throwing brawl as Sam and Henry Underwood began
to beat up one of the men involved. The law was called and Sam and Henry
got out of town just ahead of a posse. They continued to ride into
southwestern Texas. !n San Antonio, Sam met Joel Collins, a part-time
cowboy who had been acquitted of murdering a man and who owned a bar. The
pair threw in together. In the summer of 1876 Collins and Sam drove a herd
of 700 cattle north toward Dodge City, Kansas.

After selling the beef, squandering some of the money and being cheated out
of the rest, the pair wound up in the rough and tumble mining center of
Deadwood, Dakota Territory, and launched their crime spree with the
abortive stage coach robbery.

After the train robbery in Big Springs, Nebraska, the loosely formed gang
split up. With more than ten thousand dollars in gold in his saddlebags,
Sam headed back "home" to Fort Worth. Three of the men, Collins, Berry and
Heftridge, were soon killed by lawmen tracking them down for the Big
Springs robbery.

But Sam seemed to be in the clear. He hit Fort Worth, then went to Denton
where he found Henry Underwood and another former friend, Frank Jackson.
The three decided to ride to San Antonio and spend some of Sam's ready
cash.

Friends warned them that they were being followed by a Pinkerton detective
and two peace officers, so the trio changed plans and went to Fort Worth
instead. Just to keep in practice, the three held up a stage on the way,
but the Sam Bass luck was holding, and they earned only $43.

A few weeks later Sam and Jackson held up another stage, and this time took
over $400 and four gold watches. But Sam remembered the gold from the
train, and began putting together a gang for rail robbery.

Many changes were taking place in Texas during this time as well as in the
United States. In 1877 a railroad workers strike began that was to spread
nationwide. By July of 1877 a general strike halted the movement of all
rail traffic. For a week U.S. army troops battled strikers until the strike
was broken.

In April, the southern Democrats agreed to support the republicans in
congress to settle the Hayes-Tilden presidential election controversy if
the Republicans would withdraw all federal troops from the south ending the
Reconstruction era.

A crazy instrument called the telephone came onto the scene and the first
practical business telephone went into use between Boston and Somerville,
Massachusetts. A young man called Thomas Alva Edison invented what he named
the phonograph, and in fashionable Fort Worth drawing rooms there was talk
that Tolstoy had published a new book, Anna Karenina.

Dallas floundered along in the wake of these developments, striving to be a
city with a smattering of culture. It boasted nearly 3,000 residents, but
it was still a rough cow town, bred and raised by the six-gun and cattle
punching, and with mud six inches deep on Main Street with every rain.

During this time, Sam Bass went about his work in nearby Fort Worth
assembling a new band of cutthroats. He selected Seaborn Barnes, who had
been freed after a shooting when he was seventeen. Tom Spotswood, a
four-time murderer, was also brought in. Sam picked a whistle stop north of
Dallas as the ideal target for his next train robbery, the village of
Allen.

On February 22, 1878 Sam and his three men stopped the train with no
problems, but when they ordered the express car messenger to open the door,
he grabbed his gun and began shooting instead. The gang fired back but no
one was hurt. The spunky guard finally opened the door. Sam got away with
$3,000 this time, his second biggest haul of a short career. But Spotswood
had lost his mask during the fracas and was recognized. He was soon
arrested, tried and convicted. A second trial due to "new evidence" was
held and Spotswood acquitted.

Losing just one man didn't slow down Sam, and soon he was ready to hit
another train. This time he went just below Dallas to Hutchins to attack
the Houston and Texas Central again. Shooting erupted as the express agent
tried to prevent the holdup, but he was wounded and soon gave in. The three
bandits rode off with very little cash. The alert messenger had hidden most
of the money in the cold stove before he let anyone into the express car.

On March 31, 1878, Henry Underwood joined the gang after escaping from a
Nebraska jail, and brought along Arkansas Jackson, who had been a cell
mate.

It was during the spring of 1878 that Sam Bass became a legend around
Dallas. A song written about him then persists to this day in folk music.
Part of it went this way:

"Sam Bass was born in Indiana, it was his native home,

And at the age of seventeen, young Sam began to roam

Sam first came out to Texas, a cowboy for to be--

A kinderhearted fellow you seldom ever see."

Within fifty days he robbed four trains and had Dallas "set on its ear" for
his daring. All of these robberies took place within 25 miles of Dallas and
aroused so much panic that bankers and businessmen kept loaded guns within
reach at all times.

The honest folks of Dallas predicted that new settlers would not come to
Texas, and that people would refuse to ride the trains unless something was
done about Sam Bass.

Detectives, newspapermen and dime novelists flocked to Dallas to get in on
the biggest story of the year. For three months a real "cops and robbers"
aura of the best Old West tradition hung over the little community of
Dallas.

Sam hit another train, this one on the Texas and Pacific Line at Eagle Ford
on April 4. He used Arkansas Johnson and two neophytes. It was routine.
There was no shooting but Sam had to break down the express car door. The
four men found only $50 to split among them.

Dallas was in an uproar. Although Sam had not been identified positively,
most of the people decided he was the leader of the robberies. Pressure
mounted. The lawmen sweated and waited, wondering where Sam would strike
next.

Visiting newspapermen soon discovered that Dallas was not as civilized as
Boston or Philadelphia. Fewer than five thousand residents made up the
town.

Two strong elements played tug of war over the village. The town mayor
tried to create law and order, to pass city ordinances, but the saloon
owners and gambling hall operators and madams simply refused to recognize
any city laws. They owned the north side of Main from Houston to Austin
avenues, and were not about to be ruled by a mayor or town marshal.

Sometimes the "respectable" people in Dallas hired arsonists to burn down
the elegant and lavish houses of prostitution. But they were rebuilt,
bigger, gaudier and more expensive than before.

But what really set Dallas apart from the sophisticated towns of the East
in 1878 were the cattle. When a trail drive of 2500 Texas longhorns headed
for market, they came to Dallas to ford the Trinity. And that meant they
came right down unpaved Main Street, eliminating any buggy or horse
traffic, coating the town with a fantastic layer of dust from the ten
thousand hooves, and always depositing enough manure to keep the ladies
from dragging their long skirts in the streets for months.

It was a Texas that Sam Bass knew and functioned in. Some say he knew there
was mounting pressure on the Texas Rangers to find him and put him in
prison, but he kept right on robbing trains. He got more men--Underwood,
Jackson, Johnson, Sam Pipes and Al Herndon. They all met at the home of
Bill Collins to make plans. (This Collins was not related to the Joel
Collins who masterminded the Big Springs robbery.)

On April 18, 1878 all except Collins took over the Mesquite station just
east of Dallas and halted the train. Instead of surrendering, the
conductor, one Jules Alvord, grabbed a six-gun and started shooting. In the
volley of gunfire, Alvord was wounded in the arm and gave up.

The men in the express car heard the shooting and were ready. The messenger
was armed and backed up by a guard with a double-barreled shotgun. They
refused to open the door and shot through it instead.

Sam was ready for this problem. He splashed kerosene under the door and
gave the two men to a count of 50 to open the door or they would be burned
to cinders. When Sam reached a count of 40, the door came open. This time
the safe yielded only $150.

As often happened with Sam's band of loosely assembled outlaws, two of the
men split off after this robbery, and were soon captured and tried. Sam
went into hiding in Cove Hollow in Grayson county--north of Dallas
bordering the Indian Territory.

Eleven days after the Mesquite robbery, lawmen found out that Sam was holed
up in Jim Murphy's house. A squad of Texas Rangers moved up to attack.

Here Sam Bass showed his strategic ability. He advanced on the rangers to
the edge of a steep canyon, breaking the attacking force of lawmen into two
units and lessening their effectiveness. In the running gun battle, Sam
came close to death. One bullet severed his cartridge belt, and another
smashed the rifle from his hands.

Sam decided it was time to move. The gang pulled out, going through the
canyon. Sam was in familiar country and outlasted the posse even though the
Rangers kept on his trail. They were definitely on the run now, going first
to Underwood's place, but leaving when the lawmen approached. Clear Creek
was their next stop, then on to Hard Carter's ranch near Denton.

The next morning they found themselves surrounded again. A blazing gun
battle broke out, but the gang faded away without suffering any wounds.
Word spread that Sam was surrounded and scores of armed citizens rode out
to help hunt him down. Members of the gang avoided contact and made their
way to Hickory Creek and slipped away again.

Sam Bass's short life span was slipping away too, but he didn't realize it
yet. He seemed destined for a total life of crime in the old fashioned way.
It seems he never really tried to fit into the changing society.

Everyone in Texas was talking about the yellow fever epidemic in New
Orleans where 4,500 had died. Edison had adapted electricity for household
use by learning to subdivide the current. In Dallas they heard about the
university students battling police and mounted Cossacks in St. Petersburg.
Gilbert and Sullivan presented the first performance of H.M.S. Pinafore.

But Sam Bass knew about none of this. He was running for his life. Late in
May the gang was surrounded in Big Caddo Creek in Stephens County but again
got away.

Two weeks later a posse caught the gang camped near a stream. Johnson was
shot dead and the rest of the outlaws escaped but only after losing their
horses and equipment.

In this fight, Underwood got separated from the band, and was never heard
from again by Sam or the law.

The importance of law and order in Texas led to the downfall of Sam Bass.
On May 1, Jim Murphy and his father had been arrested for harboring a
criminal at their Cove Hollow farm. Jim Murphy didn't like jail and made a
deal with the Texas Rangers to help them catch Bass, if the charges against
him and his father were dropped. The plan was for Jim to jump bail and get
in touch with Bass.

Jim did and stayed at his ranch until Sam showed up almost a month later on
June 15. Murphy pretended to join the outlaw band, telling how he had been
arrested and got away.

Seaborn Barnes arrived and they began looking for a bank to rob. Henry
Collins joined them and told Sam that he'd heard that Murphy had made a
deal with the law. Confronted with the evidence Murphy said sure he made a
deal, but just so he could get out of jail. He wasn't going to turn against
his old friends.

They argued over Murphy. Sam decided Murphy was a traitor, and decided to
kill him. At the last moment, Jackson intervened, believing Murphy was
loyal. Sam's generosity cost him his life.

They kept looking for a good bank. Murphy suggested the Williamson County
Bank at Round Rock would be a good target. During the ride there they
stopped at Belton and Georgetown, which gave Murphy a chance to send
letters to the Rangers telling about the robbery at Round Rock.

On July 14 they camped outside of town and Sam began laying out plans. They
would hit the bank at 3:30 the next afternoon, after putting their horses
in the alley. Bass and Barnes would enter the bank with Jackson and Murphy
guarding the door.

This time the Rangers were ready. Murphy's doublecrossing letters had done
their work. Two detachments of Texas Rangers were in town, as well as a
Ranger captain, a county deputy sheriff and the local sheriff. The bank was
alerted and men were posted there and in the railroad depot.

But the robbery never took place. Friday night Bass and his three men went
into town to get some tobacco. Murphy feared what might happen and so left
the trio, saying he would go get corn for the horses.

Bass, Barnes and Jackson went toward the general store. Deputy Sheriff
Moore spotted them, recognized Bass and warned the county deputy. The two
lawmen crossed the street and went into the store behind the outlaws.

Deputy Sheriff Grimes walked up to the men, leaving Moore at the door. He
asked one if he was wearing a gun. All three said yes, drew and fired
before the lawman could draw. Grimes fell with six bullets in him and
Sheriff Moore took a slug through his lung. He kept firing but said after
his first shot he couldn't see what he was firing at. As the outlaws ran
out the front door, Moore saw two of them bleeding.

When the Rangers heard the shooting, they ran to the scene, firing at the
robbers as they moved toward their horses. The whole village went into an
uproar, with men who could find weapons joining in the fight.

Bass and his two robbers took cover behind fences and houses, firing as
they retreated to their horses. Early in the exchange Sam Bass took a slug
through his hand. Before he got to his horse a Ranger shot him in the back.
Jackson helped Bass onto his horse and held him there. Just as Barnes was
mounting he fell dead from a bullet in the head.

Jackson and Bass rode off. Five Rangers rode in pursuit, but lost the trail
in the dark.

Four miles out of town, Sam's wound hurt him so badly he had to stop. Bass
gave Jackson all of his money, his gun and ammunition and his horse,
insisting that Jackson take it and ride on looking out for himself.

At last Jackson left. He stopped at a farm house for some drinking water,
and the woman noticed that he was bloody. When he left she watched his
direction and the next day told the Rangers, who found and arrested him.

The morning after the shoot-out, the Texas Rangers found Bass lying under a
tree four miles from town. He was taken to town and treated but his wound
was massive and he lost strength.

Sam was questioned but refused to give any details of the gang. He said
that ff one of his bullets had killed Sheriff Grimes, it was the first man
he had ever killed.

Sam Bass died on his birthday, July 21, 1878. He had reached the mellow old
age of twenty-seven years.

BELLE STARR : THE BANDIT QUEEN

by Gary Brandner

In the winter of 1889 a shotgun blast put an end to the life of the Old
West's most famous female bandit--Belle Starr. She never killed anybody
and, as far as is known, never even took a shot at anybody. The only prison
term she served was for stealing a horse. Yet the name Belle Starr remains
linked with some of the most vicious killers and desperadoes of the
day--men like Frank and Jesse James and the Younger brothers.

Forty-one years before the buckshot ripped into Belle Starr she was born
Myra Belle Shirley on a farm near Carthage, Missouri. The date was February
5, 1848. That was a time of growing hostility between Missourians and the
neighboring territory of Kansas, soon to be a state. The battle lines were
drawn between abolitionists coming in from the East and pro-slavery forces
in Missouri. As history tells us, the abolitionists eventually won, but a
bloody inter-state feud was born that outlasted the Civil War and deeply
affected the lives of Belle Starr and her friends.

At the time Belle was born Jasper County, Missouri, was mostly wilderness,
the farms in small clearings many miles apart. The typical farm home
consisted of two clapboard one-room houses joined by a common roof. This
left a third room between the houses, open on two sides, which could be
used in good weather as a dining room or extra bedroom. Because the Osage
Indians in the surrounding country occasionally attacked one of the tiny
settlements, the sheds and barns were built adjoining the house to form a
rude stockade. The cleared area was surrounded by a zig-zag rail fence.

By 1856 Belle's father, John Shirley, had sold his farm and moved into
Carthage to become an innkeeper. Carthage was a good spot for an inn, since
it lay on the way to Fort Smith, the jumping-off point for a newly opened
route to the West.

A roadside inn in those days was usually a barnlike brick or frame building
two stories high. On the ground floor was the lobby, living room, dining
room, bar, and game room. There was usually a big open fireplace, and
pallets were available for the traveler who preferred not to sleep upstairs
where there was no heat, and where he would probably have to share a bed
with two or three other people. There was no running water, no bath, no
toilet, and hardly any privacy. Ten or fifteen people, all strangers, might
be sleeping in the same room. Still, it was better than sleeping in the
woods.

In 1857 William Clark Quantrill moved into the Kansas-Missouri dispute with
his infamous band of raiders. He operated nominally on the Confederate
side, but the Union-sympathizing Kansas Jayhawkers were just as bad. Both
guerrilla groups used the Civil War as an excuse for random looting,
pillaging, and murder. Among the top lieutenants in Quantrill's band was
the man who would become Belle's first lover--Thomas Coleman Younger, known
then and now as Cole. One of the young men who joined the Missouri
bushwhackers was Belle's older brother, Bud Shirley. In June of 1863, at
the age of twenty-three, Bud was killed by Federal militia.

The year his son died John Shirley decided he'd had enough of the border
bloodshed. He sold the inn, packed his wife and daughter into an ox-team
wagon, and headed for Texas. It was a tortuous, roundabout journey. John
Shirley had to avoid the dangerous parts of the Indian Territory, now the
state of Oklahoma. The tribes that had settled there--Cherokees, Choctaws,
Chickasaws, Seminoles, and Creeks--were having their own internal strife,
which was just as bitter as the War Between the States.

The Shirleys' destination was the village of Scyene, just east of Dallas.
There Belle's oldest brother, Preston, had a farm. When the family arrived
in 1864 Dallas had but one street, which was a dust bowl in the summer and
a mud hole in the winter. The buildings along Main Street, as it was
inevitably called, were single-story saloons, stores, restaurants, gambling
halls, and banks, many with false two-story fronts. Plank sidewalks were
scarce, but some of the businesses built wooden porches out in front with
benches for sitting and post-rails for tying horses.

At the end of the Civil War the Northern guerrillas were granted amnesty
for all acts committed during the war, while their Southern counterparts
were held accountable, hunted down and hanged or imprisoned. To former
Confederate guerrillas this decision seemed highly unfair. It helped turn
many of them into outlaws.

When Quantrill's raiders split up Cole Younger took one group with him down
to Texas. There, he knew, lived many former Missourians, who would be
sympathetic to the ex-bushwhackers.

In July of 1866 a small group of horsemen rode up to John Shirley's
farmhouse at Scyene. They followed the custom of hallooing from a distance
rather than walking straight up to the door. That was considered an
intrusion on the householder's privacy, and could also get a man shot. John
Shirley recognized the leader--a tall, well-built man with wavy brown
hair--as Cole Younger. The other riders were Cole's brothers, Jim, Bob, and
John, and another Missourian from up Clay County way, Jesse James.

John Shirley welcomed the former Quantrill men into his home. While they
stayed there a love affair developed between Myra Belle Shirley and Cole
Younger. The outcome of this was a daughter born to Belle. The child was
called Pearl Younger, though there was never a marriage between Belle and
Cole Younger.

In those days the birth of an illegitimate child was considered a disgrace,
even in Texas, and the neighbors began to shun the Shirley family. Cole
Younger, meanwhile, pulled out of Scyene along with his gang.

A few months earlier the Younger-James gang had invented a new type of
crime in Liberty, Missouri--bank robbery. They rode into town shooting and
yelling to scare everybody off the streets, then walked in and cleaned out
the Clay County Savings Association Bank without resistance. The only
casualty was a nineteen-year-old boy who did not get out of the way fast
enough and was shot dead by one of the gang. Cole and Jesse were readily
identified as the gang leaders since this was their home territory.

In May, 1867, the gang tried it again at the Hughes and Mason Bank in
Richmond, Missouri. This time it was not so easy. The townspeople heard the
outlaws coming and turned out to defend their town. Seven citizens of
Richmond, including the mayor, were killed.

As the offered rewards grew for the Younger brothers and Jesse James, they
decided it would be wise to lay low for a while. For this purpose Cole
Younger bought a farm near the Shirleys in Scyene, which was to be a
hangout for the gang. Cole invited Belle to join him, but by then the lady
had other ideas.

Rather than stay at the Shirleys' farm, Belle left pearl with her parents
and went to Dallas. There she worked as an entertainer in a dance hall, and
later dealt faro and poker in the gambling halls. She was making good money
and had become a familiar figure in Dallas, recognized for her spectacular
dress and horsemanship. Belle's usual costume was a man's Stetson hat with
the brim turned up, decorated with an ostrich plume, a high-collared bodice
jacket, and flowing skirts. As did all women in the early West, Belle rode
sidesaddle. Her saddle was custom-made at a cost of one hundred dollars.
When Cole Younger offered to let her join him at his farm and,
incidentally, do the cooking and housework for the gang, Belle told him, in
effect, to buzz off. Although there is no record of the two ever resuming
their love affair, Belle retained an affection for Cole the rest of her
life. She named the farm where she spent her last years "Younger's Bend."

In 1872 John Shirley's Scyene farm was visited by a gang of some twenty
outlaws, including still another former Missourian, Jim Reed. Belle, who
was living back at home at the time, entertained most of the gang before
settling on Reed as her favorite. After several days John Shirley lost
patience and ordered the desperadoes off his place, locking Belle in an
upstairs bedroom. However, as the gang pulled out, resourceful Jim Reed ran
a ladder up to the window and abducted Belle. They went through a
"marriage" ceremony of sorts, with another of the outlaws, John Fischer,
officiating.

The couple traveled to Rich Hill, Missouri, where Jim Reed left Belle on a
farm while he took off on a matter of personal vengeance. It seems Jim's
brother, Scott Reed, had been gunned down by some Shannon boys under the
impression they were shooting John Fischer.

Jim Reed caught up with the Shannons and put the blast on two of them.
About the same time, Reed allied himself with the Starrs, a rambunctious
family of Cherokee Indians who were engaged in a bitter feud within the
Cherokee Nation. The head of the Starr clan was Old Tom, six-feet-five and
straight as a pike pole. There were at least eight sons, one of whom was
Sam Starr, who was to give Belle the name she made famous.

After he killed the two Shannons, things got hot for Jim Reed in Missouri,
and he packed Belle and Pearl off to California. Belle's second and last
child, Ed Reed, was born in Los Angeles. Although there is no record of
Jim's activities in California, it is safe to assume that he made a living
in his usual manner--robbery.

When he returned from California Jim Reed bought a farm near that of his
father-in-law, John Shirley, at Scyene. The old man now grudgingly accepted
Belle's "marriage" to Reed, since the birth of his grandson.

The first robbery in which Belle is said to have personally taken part
occurred on the evening of November 20, 1873. The victim was an aged and
wealthy Creek Indian named Watt Grayson who lived on the North Canadian
River, not far from the home of Tom Starr and his brood. Accounts of the
crime say that four robbers forced their way into the Grayson house. One of
them was a woman dressed in man's clothing, later identified as Belle. When
Grayson refused to tell where his money was hidden, the bandits looped a
noose around his neck and threw the other end of the rope over a rafter.
They repeatedly hoisted Grayson aloft as his terrified wife looked on,
choking the breath from the old Indian until he showed them where to find a
hidden trap door. The loot consisted of $22,000 in gold and another $12,000
in worthless Confederate greenbacks.

Following the Grayson robbery Jim Reed and Belle moved to Dallas. There
Belle took up residence at the Planters' Hotel while Jim, with a price on
his head, kept out of sight. Belle took the opportunity to live it up. The
law gave her no trouble, even though she was known to be an intimate of
outlaws. People began calling her the Bandit Queen. The nickname appealed
to Belle, and she began to live the part. She decked herself out in flowing
black velvet with a brace of revolvers holstered at her waist, and barged
around Dallas drinking, card playing, and hell-raising as the equal of any
man. Sometimes she would get into a fringed buckskin outfit and gallop
through the streets shooting at the sky and scattering pedestrians.

On April 7, 1874 the San Antonio-Austin stage was robbed. Stagecoach
robbery was not uncommon in other parts of the West, but it was something
new in Texas, so the crime was big news locally. Jim Reed was identified as
one of the bandits and hunted for the next few months. In August Deputy
Sheriff John T. Morris caught up with him in a farmhouse fifteen miles
northwest of McKinney, Texas. When Morris called for Reed to surrender, the
outlaw dived under a wooden table, upended it, and rushed the deputy using
the table as a shield. Since the tabletop was not bulletproof, it was no
great trick for Morris to put three bullets through the wood, killing Reed
with the third shot.

There is a grisly epilog to the death of Jim Reed that occurred after his
body was returned to McKinney. The following is from a dispatch with a date
of August 8, 1874, that appeared in the major Texas newspapers:

          Reed's body had become very much decomposed, particularly about
          the head, having been shot just between the nose and the right
          eye. The drayman, in carrying him to the potter's field mistook
          the place, and in returning, with the breeze to the windward of
          the corpse, he took sick, and was compelled to abandon it on the
          roadside. It was, however, taken charge of by the sheriff, and
          finally interred.

The year 1874 was a bad one for outlaw friends of Belle. Not only did Jim
Reed cash in, but John, the youngest of the Younger brothers, was killed
near Monegaw Springs, Missouri, in a shoot-out with Pinkerton detectives,
and John Fischer, who had performed Belle's "marriage" ceremony, was gunned
down by peace officers in Waco, Texas.

After Reed's death Belle deposited young Ed and Pearl with relatives. With
no children to tie her down, Belle returned to Dallas and began helling
around again. During this time she was arrested once for arson and once for
horse stealing. She beat the rap on both counts. In 1876 the lawless career
of the three surviving Younger brothers came to an end. Cole, Jim, and Bob
Younger, along with Frank and Jesse James and three others, staged a
disastrous raid on the bank at Northfield, Minnesota. One citizen and two
bandits were killed. Cole Younger was badly wounded, and all three brothers
were captured near Madelia, Minnesota. Only the James boys escaped. The
take from the attempted robbery? Nothing.

The Youngers pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty, and were sentenced
to life in the Minnesota state penitentiary at Stillwater. Bob died in
prison in 1889 of tuberculosis. Cole and Jim were paroled in 1901. A year
later Jim committed suicide. Cole Younger died March 21, 1916, after a
year's illness, at the age of seventy-two. He was the only one of Belle
Starr's lovers to die with his boots off.

With Cole Younger in prison and Jim Reed dead, Belle severed any ties she
might still have had with honest society. She allied herself openly with a
band of desperadoes ranging throughout Texas and the Indian Territory. She
chose lovers by whim and discarded them quickly. Among this semi-select
group were such outlaws as Jack Spaniard, Jim French, Sam Starr, John
Middieton, Jim July, and a swarthy character known as Blue Duck, with whom
Belle posed for one of her rare photographs.

By the time she was thirty Belle was the acknowledged leader among her
circle of outlaws. She kept them in line with her powerful will, her
superior intelligence, and plain old sex appeal. Though she was no beauty,
possessing a lantern jaw and smallish, deep-set eyes, there was something
about Belle that turned men on.

Some time in 1880 Belle officially became Belle Starr. She married Sam
Starr, son of the tough old Cherokee, Tom Starr. Sam was twenty-eight years
old to Belle's thirty-two. After the death of Jim Reed, the lovers Belle
took were progressively younger than she was.

Sam and Belle Starr moved into their home in the Indian Territory-a
two-room log house on the banks of the Canadian River that became known as
Younger's Bend. The only approach to the house was along a narrow, wooded
canyon trail. In later years Belle built two more cabins on the grounds for
the outlaws who made Younger's Bend a regular stopover.

One of these visitors was Jesse James. After lying low for a few years
after the Northfield raid, Jesse ran out of money and gathered some of his
old gang together. Brother Frank, who was in poor health, did not join him
this time. The new James gang pulled three train robberies, the last on
September 7, 1881, then disbanded. Jesse headed for Younger's Bend to hole
up for a while.

Belle never cared much for Jesse James. For one thing, he was walking
around free while Cole Younger was in prison. Also, Cole and Jesse had
never really gotten along, being rivals for leadership of the gang, and
Belle naturally took Cole's side. However, Jesse was ready and able to pay
for sanctuary at Younger's Bend, and Belle Starr was not a woman to turn
down a dollar. In April of 1882, after Jesse had left Younger's Bend for
St. Joseph, Missouri, he was shot in the back by Bob Ford.

For a couple of years Belle stayed out of public sight, apparently content
with being the brains of her outlaw gang. Then in February, 1883, she was
arrested and convicted of a crime for the only time in her life. Belle and
Sam Starr were brought into Fort Smith, charged with stealing horses. It
took a jury just one hour to find them guilty. The Starrs were sentenced to
a year each in the Federal penitentiary at Detroit. They actually served
nine months, with time off for good behavior.

After their release, Sam and Belle returned to Younger's Bend, and Belle
resumed direction of her band of desperadoes. Among the new arrivals was a
man named John Middleton, who was wanted in Arkansas and Texas for arson,
larceny, and murder. The time was around Christmas of 1884.

About the same time Sam Starr was implicated in a robbery of the Creek
Nation treasury, and both U.S. marshals and Indian police were after him.
Sam left Younger's Bend for several months to hide out with kin, leaving
Belle alone with John Middleton.

Belle's ardor for Sam Starr had apparently cooled, and she and Middleton
made plans to slip away together. They were to travel separately, Middleton
being a wanted man, and meet at the mountain home of Middleton's mother
near Dardanelle, Arkansas. They set off on May 5, 1885, Belle in a covered
wagon loaded with provisions, and Middleton on horseback.

Belle reached the rendezvous in Dardanelle, but John Middleton never did.
Three days after the couple had separated, a horse was found entangled in
the brush on the bank of the Poteau River a few miles from the Arkansas
border. A search of the fiver turned up the badly decomposed body of a man,
apparently drowned, that had washed up on the bank. Half the face was
gone--eaten away by buzzards was the supposition.

After she verified that the body was, indeed, John Middleton, Belle
returned to Younger's Bend and Sam Starr. How she explained the situation
to Sam is not known. Some people suspected that it was not buzzards who
destroyed the face of John Middleton, but the impassive Indian, Sam Starr,
who had trailed his wife's lover and shot him out of the saddle with a
shotgun.

Things kept getting hotter for Sam Starr, with both the Federal government
and the Indian authorities after him. In September, 1886, Chief Bill Vann
of the Cherokee Nation caught sight of Sam as he rode through a cornfield
on a favorite black mare of Belle's named Venus. Vann, who had three other
Indian policemen with him, called to Sam to Surrender. When Sam spurred his
horse to a gallop Vann fired several times, killing the horse and wounding
Sam in the arm. Sam was lodged overnight in a farmhouse where his wound was
dressed. The plan was to take him the next day to face the Choctaw Council.
However, word of Sam's capture reached a gang of his brothers and friends
and they surrounded the farmhouse, overpowered the guards, and rescued Sam.

When Belle heard that Bill Vann was organizing a large posse of Cherokees
to retake her husband, she persuaded Sam that he would be better off taking
his chances with the Federal court in Fort Smith. There he could be
released on bond. This would put him under the protection of the U.S.
government, safe from Indian authorities. If he faced the tribal courts his
chances were not good, since the Choctaw chiefs hated the whole family of
Starrs, holding them responsible for much of the outlawry in the Indian
Territory. Sam took Belle's advice and rode into Fort Smith where he was
arraigned and almost immediately released on bail.

It was a case of mistaken identity that finally finished Sam Starr.
Somehow, Sam got the idea that the shots in the cornfield that wounded him
and killed Belle's horse were fired by Frank West, a neighbor he had been
feuding with for some time. In Christmas week of 1886 Sam, Belle, and the
now-grown children, Pearl and Ed, rode down to a dance on the south side of
the Canadian River near Whitefield. It was dark by the time they arrived.
Many of the celebrants were gathered around a fire outside the cabin where
the dancing was going on. Among those seated before the fire, Sam
recognized Frank West.

Sam cussed West out for the supposed cornfield shooting, then pulled out
his six-shooter and blazed away. One of his slugs tore a hole in West's
throat, but before West went down he drew his own gun and got off a shot
that caught Sam Starr in the side and drove upward into the heart. Sam
staggered over to a tree and held himself up there for several seconds
before toppling forward on his face. By the time bystanders reached the
fallen men, both were dead.

Not long after Sam's death Belle, at thirty-eight, married a handsome
twenty-four-year-old Creek Indian named Jim July. At Belle's insistence he
changed his name to conform with hers, and was thereafter known as Jim
Starr.

On February 2, 1889, Jim Starr rode into Fort Smith to answer a charge of
larceny. Belle rode along with her husband for about fifteen miles, then
turned back. The next afternoon Belle's daughter Pearl was startled to see
her mother's horse gallop into Younger's Bend riderless. A little later a
neighbor found the body of Belle Starr lying face down in the muddy road,
dead of buckshot wounds in the back.

Jim Starr was given a continuance on his trial so he could attend his
wife's burial service. There he made a citizen's arrest of a farmer named
Edgar Watson declaring that he was Belle's murderer. Jim ascribed to Watson
the rather flimsy motive of having argued with

Belle earlier about the rental of some lands. Watson was held in jail at
Fort Smith for nearly three months, then released for lack of evidence.

Several theories went the rounds concerning who really killed Belle Starr.
One theory held that Belle's son, Ed Reed, had engaged in an incestuous
relationship with his mother, and had killed her because he was jealous of
Jim Starr. Another said that Jim Starr himself, learning of some new
infidelity of Belle's, had sneaked back behind her on the trail and shot
her. Still another guess is that John Middleton's brother Jim blasted Belle
out of the saddle to avenge the death of his brother, for which he blamed
Belle. The real killer, whoever he was, was never caught.

Jim Starr did not return to Fort Smith on the new date set for his trial,
and in January, 1890, he was shot by deputy marshals while trying to avoid
arrest. The wounded man was brought into Fort Smith, and four days later he
died--the last lover of the Bandit Queen.

BILLY THE KID : WESTERN ROBIN HOOD

by Allan Morgan

In the late 1860's the cattle frontier was advancing westward as well as
toward the north, from Texas. Lincoln County, in south-central New Mexico,
was one of the finest ranges for cattle, having excellent grass and a good
climate. It also provided a ready market at the nearby military posts and
reservations.

Lincoln County, Billy the Kid's stamping ground, nearly 300,000 square
acres, typified the Old West of the movies. In the town of Lincoln, then
the county seat, were found the saloons and characters of which these horse
operas were made. Old-time Lincoln was a cow town--not a railroad or a
mining town. To it flocked the gunslingers, gamblers, the badmen one jump
ahead of the law, the soldiers and rustlers and the girls. All the
"western" movie cliches did occur here... the rustling, the fights over
water holes, feuds over grazing rights, squabbles over government contracts
and so on. And that strutting gunman, that cock of the walk: Billy the Kid.

In Lincoln County one of the most famous cattle feuds of the West took
place... centering around Billy. In 1878 the so-called Lincoln County War
flared up between the rival Murphy and Tunstall-McSween factions. The war
lasted five months and culminated in a three-day gunfight on the streets of
Lincoln in which a half dozen men were killed and more wounded.

The early West varied. The cattlemen and cowboys of the south were a very
different breed from those of Montana, for instance. The stagecoach lines
wrote their own story; stagelines went everywhere, connecting tiny hamlets
with larger towns, with the railroads, with civilization. Badmen robbed the
stages; the Rangers and sheriffs chased the badmen. The railroads wrote
another chapter of the West, a very different one from all others. Most do
not realize the railroad spanned the continent only four years after the
Civil War. (The peak years of bloody Abilene and Dodge City had not yet
begun.) Miners tramped the hills and deserts long before barbed wire--and
they still do. Mining communities sprang up, such as the notorious Cripple
Creek. They were every bit as wild and woolly as the cow towns. The
soldiers and Indians were another facet of the West. The Indian wars lasted
until the 1890's. Soldiers were the only law in many vast territories.
Homesteaders and farmers wrote another page; sheepmen wrote their chapter
and fought with the cattlemen over ranges and water.

The early West was constant change. The cattle drives soon gave way to the
railroads. The huge open ranges gave way to barbed wire. Lawlessness and
violence gave way to vigilance committees and real law.

Shacks and tents gave way to real houses. Lincoln was a town of adobe
houses, frame buildings and the famous false fronts which have come to be
the trademark of the western town. Early photographs show streets with
store buildings fronted by porticos held up by wooden posts, shading
boardwalks. New Mexico's sun is hot. We see rough corrals, privies and
stark telegraph poles. There was no electricity and no gas. Adobe was a
popular construction material. It was solid, vermin free and cool in
summer, warm in winter. Air conditioning had not yet been thought of.
Heating was by stove or fireplace. Women cooked on wood stoves. Someone had
to haul water to each house for cooking, washing and drinking. People
bathed infrequently.

But they wanted to better themselves. Traveling salesmen went everywhere
for orders. Mail order houses grew fat because of the demand for their
products. Catalogs were cherished and pored over. The movies seldom show
this desire for schools and betterment. They focus on the violence and
stark drama of the age--like the Lincoln County War.

The most violent figure of that conflict was William H. Bonney, known as
Billy the Kid.

Billy was an outlaw. If he ever worked for a living it was infrequently,
and never for any length of time. He detested work. Of course working for
wages in that day was a terrible way to try for riches. A cowhand in the
saddle from dawn to dusk, and sometimes half the night, hot weather and
freezing, made about forty dollars a month. When he worked, that is. Many
cowboys worked as firemen on railroads in slack seasons.

As an outlaw, Billy could do ten times as well in a few days by selling the
cows that got tangled in his rope. Or he spent his time gambling, as most
gunmen did.

Of all the outlaws of the Old West, Billy the Kid is one of the most
legendary. He is also one about whom the facts are extremely elusive. Early
writers were careless of facts and sometimes attributed the deeds of one
person to another. No badmen kept diaries. Memories faded and became
rose-colored with the passing of years. It is sure that Billy was loved by
some, tolerated by many and feared by others. He was apparently a complex
character. Men who knew him described him as a fine fellow, jolly and
fun-loving--while he was engaged in having a good time. But he could turn,
in the flick of an eye, from good-natured to homicidal.

One of the things that sets him apart from other, lesser known men who were
just as dangerous and good with a gun, was his personality. It is apparent,
from all that was said and written about him by people who knew him well,
that he had an attractive personality... when he wanted to turn it on.

Almost nothing is known of his early life, including the place of his birth
which is variously given as New Mexico Territory and Brooklyn, New York.
When he was about ten he lived in Silver City, Colorado with his mother and
stepfather, William Antrim, whom he hated. (Some say Billy's real name was
McCarty.) Mostly he went under the name Bonney.

Silver City was an ordinary frontier town, filled with the usual hard cases
and undesirable elements. There were many of these types in the West for
several excellent reasons: they were dodging eastern police; they could not
compete elsewhere and drifted with the winds; and on the frontier, law was
absent or lax.

Billy hung out in the stores and saloons, listening and learning from the
toughs and desperados. His mother was apparently his only restraining
influence. But when his mother died he began running wild. He left home and
was soon in serious trouble. He shot a man in an argument and skipped town
in a hurry. He was about twelve years old at the time.

For a while he drifted, and no one knows exactly where. (Billy did not
always tell the truth.) He gambled, and he laid in supplies, signing the
chits with his six gun. Probably he rustled horses and cattle and sold them
where he could. It should be said that often small time rustlers were
treated kindly by juries. Juries were made up of ordinary men who believed
that the big cattle outfits had got their start swinging a "wide loop"
branding any cow they could find--and they weren't about to condemn a man
who did the same thing. (Stealing a horse was another matter. That was
often worse than murder.)

But Billy survived, and he did not work. His closest friends said that
Billy was not the type to hold down a regular job. In Lincoln County he
met, and some say worked for, John Tunstall. Billy liked Tunstall, saying
he was the only man who had ever treated him fair. Tunstall was a young
Englishman who, with Alexander McSween, owned a banking and mercantile
company in Lincoln. McSween and Tunstall were friends of John Chisum, the
cattle baron, but they were competitors of L. G. Murphy of the Murphy,
Riley, Dolan Company. Murphy, Riley & Dolan had a big store, housing
offices, a billiard room, a post office, visitors rooms and living
quarters. They did not want competition and they set about driving it out
of town.

This business opposition led to hard feelings, then to a blood feud. It
resulted in the killing of Tunstall... the event that started the Lincoln
County War. Tunstall was murdered in cold blood by members of Sheriff
William Brady's posse. Brady was a Murphy man.

Furious, Billy took out after the unprosecuted killers of his friend.

At this time Billy Bonney (alias McCarty, alias Antrim, alias Kid) was a
small man--thus the name Kid--about five feet, seven inches in height, but
lean and hard as a cougar. He had straight brown hair and light blue eyes
flecked with brown, and a long chin. Men who knew him said he was usually
smiling. His most obvious physical characteristic was his two buck teeth.
He is credited with a "careless gaiety," even by Pat Garrett who knew him
well. He could be the life of the party. Many poor families, both Anglo and
Mexican, considered him a Robin Hood. He gave them presents--perhaps
beef--and was often in their homes. They knew what he was. These were the
people who did not give him up to the law, even when they knew about the
large reward to be had for a right word. Billy went to the
bailes--dances--and romanced the girls. He was a hero to the poor.

Unfortunately he was also a killer without conscience.

He took few chances at killing, however. He usually waited till he had the
odds in his favor, and he was not above outright murder.

Because of the Tunstall murder, Sheriff Brady and a deputy were shot down
in the main street of Lincoln in broad daylight. Witnesses did not come
forward readily. But Billy the Kid was one of the accused.

Sheriff Brady was the good/bad lawman of the horse operas. It was not
unusual for a horse thief to later become a marshal or a sheriff. The
notorious Billy Brooks, gunslinger and horse thief, became a lawman--and
was later lynched by an angry mob in Kansas. Brady was a member of the
Murphy faction and did not bother to arrest the murderers of John Tunstall.

At Brady's death the McSween group "elected" their own sheriff, but the
election did not stick. The Murphy aggregation appealed to the pro-Murphy
governor of the territory. The governor appointed a sheriff, a man named
Peppin--another Murphy man.

One of the men who had killed Tunstall was Andrew Roberts, called Buckshot
by his pals. Roberts was a small but tough ex-soldier who carried buckshot
pellets in one shoulder from an early encounter. He could not lift a rifle
above the waist.

Billy and half a dozen others went after him and cornered him finally near
a mill. Buckshot put up a terrific fight. He killed several and wounded
others and rnade the affair so hot for Billy that he and his pals hastily
departed. They had enough of Buckshot Roberts. This particular battle has
been described as one of the most unequal and desperate of the West.

The new sheriff, Peppin, thereupon set out to bring in Billy, dead or
alive, and to flatten the Tunstall-McSween group once and for all. The
sheriff and his posse, which included a few out-of-town hired guns,
succeeded in running Billy and his friends to earth in Lincoln. They were
in the McSween residence.

The house was besieged. The sheriffs men surrounded it and fired into the
adobe house with long range buffalo rifles. The people inside fired back
through loopholes and windows. Both McSween and his wife were in the house.

This was the final showdown of the Tunstall-McSween and Murphy groups. The
desperate fight lasted three days. Men from both sides were killed,
including McSween himself. The Murphy supporters managed to get close
enough to set fire to the house. The roof was ablaze, filling the house
with smoke. When the roof fell in, the defenders were forced out. They ran
from the smoke and fire into the darkness and many were shot down. Billy
the Kid, a pistol in each hand, ran out spewing bullets and succeeded in
getting away.

It was the end of the feud. McSween and Tunstall were both dead and the
Murphy faction was firmly in power in Lincoln County--for a time. But it
was fading fast.

All efforts turned to hunting down Billy. By reason of his siding with the
losing group he was a marked man, wanted on several murder charges.

But Billy still had his legions of poor friends, and some in high places
who hated the Murphy people. No one betrayed him, but Billy left Lincoln
and supported himself by rustling. He gathered a cutthroat gang about him
and stole horses and cattle, selling them to buyers in small towns all the
way to the Texas panhandle. Bills of sale were not difficult to
manufacture, and rebranding was only a matter of work. Many ranchers did
not look too closely at small herds offered for sale at reduced prices.

Rustling was easy because most ranges were unfenced. Barbed wire had been
invented in 1874, but its acceptance was slow. The wire was expensive at
first and small holders could not afford it. Smooth wire had been tried and
found to be ineffective. Why should wire with little barbs be any better?
But those who used it found it did the job and by 1880 it was coming into
wide use. It could separate herds, fence off water holes and delineate
range lands.

It also started dozens of small range wars--fence wars, which were similar
to waterhole wars. (Cowmen were apt to consider all water holes as public
property and those fenced off called for shooting affairs.) Cowboys carried
wire cutters, or hammer and staples, depending on which side they found
themselves.

It is true that barbed wire helped to bring law and order to the West, but
it made a fence rider of the free-ranging cowhand. Many opposed it, on
several grounds. The fiercely independent cowboy hated to be "fenced in,"
but in this he was bucking the inevitable.

Billy, however, did not live long enough to see the range entirely fenced.

About this time President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed a new governor to
the New Mexico Territory. He was General Lew Wallace, one of the army's
"civilian" generals, a man who had been at Shiloh with Grant during the
Civil War. When he went to Lincoln, Wallace was engaged in writing the
romantic novel which was to make him famous--Ben Hur.

Assuming office, Governor Wallace was faced with a law and order crisis. At
the center of this was Billy the Kid.

In an effort to bring peace to the area, Wallace arranged for an interview
with the outlaw, Bonney. He believed in going to the heart of the problem.
The two men met secretly, face to face, and had a talk. If Billy would stop
his depredations and settle down, Wallace might pardon him. Billy could
then start over with a clean slate.

Nothing came of this preliminary talk. The Murphy faction still demanded
Billy's death by hanging. Posses hunted him. Billy was forced to kill
several men who were trying to gun him.

If Billy had hopes for a pardon they were shattered when Governor Wallace
authorized another reward for him.

And about this time Billy received other bad news. A man he knew very well,
Pat Garrett, had just been elected sheriff of the county. Garrett was not a
Murphy man. He was fearless and honest, and a gunslinger of no mean
ability. As part of his job, Garrett set out to capture the outlaw, Billy
the Kid.

The issue was no longer that Billy was the fair-haired knight of the
McSweens. Now he was only a horse and cattle thief and an accused murderer.

But it didn't make him easier to catch.

Sheriff Pat Garrett was en energetic man and his posses began to hound the
Kid... who would not leave the area. Garrett and his men came upon Billy
and several others finally in a stone hut once used by sheep-herders, near
Stinking Springs.

Billy had announced that he did not intend being taken alive, and that any
lawman would have to come a-shooting. The posse surrounded the hut and
called for the fugitives to give themselves up. The response was not
encouraging. One of Billy's crew, Charlie Bowdre, showed himself in the
doorway and was shot.

The others held out for a time, but were starved into surrendering. They
tossed their guns out and were taken into custody.

It was the winter of 1881. Billy was imprisoned in Las Vegas, New Mexico,
later in Santa Fe. His appeals to the governor fell on deaf ears. A new
president, James Garfield, had been elected and Governor Wallace's
appointment would end with Garfield's inauguration. Let the next governor
worry about an ordinary outlaw.

Billy was tried and convicted in a pro-Murphy community. The old feud
hatreds still hung over him. He was sentenced to hang in Lincoln, and
turned over to Sheriff Garrett for the interim.

Garrett installed his prisoner in a cell on the second floor of an old
adobe building, formerly a store, now remodeled to be a courthouse. Two men
were assigned to watch him. One of these guards was Bob Ollinger, a man who
cordially hated Billy. The other man was a good-natured sort named J. W.
Bell.

Unfortunately, jails in small cow towns were unsophisticated lock-ups at
best. For the most part they were intended to detain people for short
stays. So the annals of the Old West are filled with accounts of jailbreaks
of various kinds. Wes Hardin, the grim Texican, once broke jail when his
friends and cousins tied a lasso rope to the bars of his cell window and
pulled the entire thing out in one chunk.

The built-in problem of frontier jails was plumbing--not that it wasn't in
other buildings. Either the guards had to empty the chamber pots for the
inmates, a job they detested, or they had to take each inmate to an outside
privy on call. It is supposed that Billy used this excuse to make his break
when Bell was guarding him. Oilinger was with the other prisoners, across
the street at mealtime.

Somehow Billy fooled Bell and got his hands on a pistol. He shot Bell dead.
No one knows exactly how, because the two were alone.

Hearing the shot, Oilinger ran back across the street toward the makeshift
courthouse.

Billy called to him from the second floor. When Oilinger looked up, Billy
the Kid gave him both barrels with a shotgun--Ollinger's own gun. Then he
broke the gun and threw it down at the body.

The Kid armed himself, but he was shackled with leg irons. At gunpoint he
got someone to file them off. He stole a horse and rode away... as
witnesses say, laughing and jeering.

Pat Garrett was out of town at the time. Considerable pressure was put on
him to track down Billy at once. But he did not jump to do it. By his own
words Garrett was censured for his seeming unconcern and inactivity in the
matter of Billy's recapture. But his strategy was to make the Kid feel
secure, and not to drive him out of the county. He feared that too much
activity would lose him the chance to bring Billy to justice. Garrett kept
his ear to the ground, wanting to be sure before he moved.

Garrett got word that the Kid was in the vicinity of old Fort Sumner, one
of his favorite haunts. Billy had a girl there. With two deputies, Garrett
left at once, riding mostly at night and taking unfrequented roads. He well
knew Billy's dependence on the grapevine.

But Garrett did not locate Billy; he decided to talk to an old friend, Pete
Maxwell who lived nearby. Garrett and his men approached Maxwell's house in
the dark. A man they later learned was the Kid walked past them and entered
a wing of the Maxwell house. They thought the man was one of Maxwell's many
relatives.

Leaving his deputies outside, Garrett circled the house then went inside,
finding Maxwell in bed. He walked to the head of the bed and sat down on it
near the pillow, and asked Maxwell if he knew where the Kid was.

Maxwell replied that Billy had been there, but he did not know where he was
now.

At that moment a man came to the door of the room. It was very dark but
Garrett could discern a knife in one of the man's hands, and a pistol in
the other. The man's feet made no sound, so he was probably bootless. At
first Garrett thought the man was a relative or an employee of Maxwell's.
The man came into the room, asking Maxwell in a Iow voice about the two
strangers outside.

Garrett realized that this was Billy--he knew Billy's voice.

Billy came so close that Garrett might have reached out and touched him,
before Billy realized suddenly there was someone sitting on the bed beside
Maxwell. Billy raised his pistol and retreated rapidly toward the door
asking, "Quien es? Quien es?" (Who's that? Who's that?)

Garrett drew his pistol and fired twice. Billy the Kid fell dead.

Billy's habit was to shoot first and think about it later. He had declared
his intention to shoot Garrett on sight. This one time he hesitated had
been the first, and it was fatal.

The inquest was held the next day, exonerating Sheriff Garrett, declaring
the shooting justifiable homicide. Billy was buried in the old cemetery at
Fort Sumner July 15, 1881. His age was said to be 21 years and 7 months.

Pat Garrett, in his own account of the shooting, goes to some pains to say
that "the entire body was buried that day," and that it is still there.
This is because it was not unusual for unscrupulous types to carry from
town to town exhibits purporting to be the bodies, heads or skeletons of
notorious men. After the assassination of Lincoln, for instance, there were
probably dozens of side show exhibits displaying "Booth's" body.

Billy the Kid died as he had lived-in a blaze of gunfire. The popular story
was that he had killed a man for each year of his life, and maybe he had.
Men like the Kid were not ones to shun trouble and they killed in
out-of-the-way places as well as on main streets. Billy was tricky as a
teased sidewinder, and he did not boast of his murders. There was much
violence in his known life, so there is no reason to believe the pattern
changed during those months that are not accounted for.

Some feel that, on the whole, the world was better off without him.

BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE WILD BUNCH

by Daniel T. Streib

Hunching deeper into his collar, the cowboy turned his back against the
wind-driven slow, his eyes sweeping the raw canyon to the south. After
hours of waiting, he was thoroughly chilled and just as disgusted. Finally,
muttering something, he dug a pencil and paper from his pocket and
scratched out a hurried message. He anchored the note under a stone, then
mounted the horse at his side and with a reassuring touch of his six-guns
swung the horse to the north. He did not look back.

The note lay there under the lone cedar tree for another sixteen hours
before lawyer Douglas Preston and two Union Pacific executives drove up in
their rented buckboard. Spotting the paper at his feet, Preston picked it
up and read:

"Damn you, Preston, you have double crossed me. I waited all day but you
didn't show up. Tell the Union Pacific to go to hell. And you can go with
them!"

Thus ended Butch Cassidy's brief attempt to go straight. The time was early
spring, 1900. The place, Lost Soldier Pass, a wild area forty-five miles
north of Rock Springs, Wyoming. Having lost their way in the meandering
canyons during the storm, the three men in the buckboard were a day late
for their appointment with the undisputed leader of the biggest, wildest
bunch of outlaws in the West.

Cassidy must have foreseen the end of the famed outlaw era. By this time
several of his "Wild Bunch" were dead or imprisoned--Elza Lay had been
wounded and was in Laramie penitentiary; Bob Meeks had lost a leg in a
futile escape attempt; George Curry was dead; and the bounties on Butch's
head totalled $50,000. The straight life had begun to look good.

With this in mind Cassidy had contacted first Judge Orlando Powers (some
say Butch even had two private meetings with Utah Governor Wefts) and then
Preston. The lawyer went to Union Pacific authorities, suggesting a deal.

"You hire Cassidy as an express guard," he said, "and he and his bunch will
protect your lines against future robbers."

This was the same policy followed by ranchers: hire the rustlers as
cowhands. Since they never hustled a boss, they'd use their private
branding irons on others.

The plan sounded like cheap protection to the robbery-plagued UP and the
meeting with Cassidy was all set-until the storm botched it up.

Maybe it's not too surprising that during the following August the Wild
Bunch blew up a UP baggage car midway between Rawlins and Rock Springs and
slipped away with a reported $55,000!

The outlaw dynasty led by George LeRoy Parker, alias Butch Cassidy,
flourished during the 1875-1905 period. These were dynamic, explosive
laissez faire years when greed and need brought the best and the worst in
men... years when the frontier spirit of the Old West created its own law
and its own code of honor, even among thieves.

Perhaps because of his unique "code of honor," Butch Cassidy emerges,
eighty years after his heyday, as more hero than anti-hero, still fondly
regarded by his many biographers, even in this debunking era of the 1970's.

Subject of the successful film named for him and his partner Harry
Longabaugh (the Sundance Kid), this popular renegade sprang from a
background of sturdy Mormon pioneers. To further their colonizing of the
West, the Mormons had converted and recruited skilled workers from abroad.
One of these was a prosperous English weaver named Robert Parker, who in
1856 emigrated with his family to lowa City, Iowa, the push-off point for
the new Zion.

So successful had been the recruiting venture that there were not enough
wagon trains for the trip west. Hastily piling their belongings onto
hand-drawn carts, the immigrant Handcart Pioneers trekked the 1,000 miles
across plains and mountains to Salt Lake City.

One historian writes that Robert Parker died in a snow-choked mountain pass
during the odyssey. His wife and oldest son, twelve-year-old Maximilian,
"scratched a shallow trench in the snow, laid him away as best they could,
and pushed on to Zion, their grief dulled by cold and starvation."

Like much of the documentation on the much-documented Parker history, this
account is probably more heart-rending than historic. Pearl Baker, a
contemporary and respected biographer, says the family arrived in Mormon
headquarters before snowfall and moved on to American Falls where Parker
became a school teacher.

At any rate, by the mid-1860's Maximilian had married and on April 13,
1866, became the father of George LeRoy, the eldest in a family of seven
children. When George was twelve, the family bought a ranch near
Circleville, Utah, an easy distance from the remote and rugged area now
called Bryce Canyon National Park.

These were the days when ranches were open houses to traveler and rustler
alike. Doors were never locked. If a house was empty, the rider helped
himself to some food, left a coin if he had one, and moved on. The
close-mouthed pioneers, knowing they too might need a helping hand one day,
offered acceptance and hospitality with few questions asked.

Before the Parkers bought their ranch, it had been such a stopping place
for a traveler-rustler named Mike Cassidy and his boys. Mike hired on as a
cowhand for the new owner.

It was Cassidy who educated the young George LeRoy Parker in the how-to's
of the West--roping, riding, branding and gunslinging. If environment meant
anything, it was not surprising that George was an apt pupil. Oldtimers of
the area alleged that at least half of the residents of Circle Valley were
rustlers. They looked upon their trade as a way of life no more or less
disreputable than that of the land, mine and railroad barons. The rustlers'
attitude was that these ruthless tycoons had built their fortunes
unhampered by law; shouldn't a man trying to make a living have the same
opportunity?

From a practical standpoint, rustling was a necessity for the new settler
who tried to carve out an outfit of his own. Oldtimers spared no holds when
it came to dealing with the unwelcome new squatters. But despite the
ranchers' efforts to protect themselves, cattle and mavericks on the open
range were fair game for the quick lariat and big iron.

Young Parker, then, probably felt no qualms about going on the rustle. By
the time he was sixteen, he had won a reputation as one of the best shots
in the valley. Two years later the compactly built teenager--5'9", 155
pounds--took off on his own to a new life and a new name. He called himself
George Cassidy, in honor of his old friend, who by now had left for less
sheriff-infested country.

When and how George became "Butch" is a matter of some disagreement. Some
say he did a stint as a butcher; others maintain he was thrown into a creek
by the recoil of a gun--a gun called "Butch"--while a bunch of joshing
cowhands looked on. Whatever its source, the nickname was to appear on many
a "Wanted" poster in the next thirty years.

Butch's first reported arrest came for theft of a saddle when he was still
a boy. Some say his treatment in jail may have led to his career in crime.
Possibly, but certainly there were other contributing factors, not the
least of which was the youth's own adventure-loving personality. That facet
of his nature and an underlying sense of fair play were illustrated in his
next fracas with the law.

Arrested for horse theft, Butch was being escorted across the desert to the
nearest pokey when he grabbed one of his captor's guns, took their keys,
unlocked his handcuffs and rode off with their horses. Down the trail a
bit, he noticed their canteens still hanging on the saddles, and as legend
tells it, he turned back to return the water for the law's long walk to
town.

A popular outlaw, who is recalled as fun-loving, friendly, courteous to
women and kind to children, Cassidy was kind of a western Robin Hood. He
never robbed an individual--impersonal banks, trains, and corporate
payrolls were his usual targets. He served only one prison sentence, never
killed a man (at least in this country), and never drank to excess.

Cassidy was a cut above the average hoodlum types of his time--the Jesse
Jameses and the Wyatt Earps. And, as western buffs like to point out, even
the average hood of that era was several cuts above the bombers and
hijackers of today.

After striking out on his own, the young Cassidy went to work in the
Telluride, Colorado, mines. There he met Tom MeCatry, already an outlaw,
and his brother-in-law, Matt Warner. They were to become the "Invincible
Three."

Their fwst big coup was the Telluride Bank Robbery. Butch obviously
prepared for the hit well in advance. He had been in the booming mining
town for a month and was seen training his horse to stand motionless while
he mounted at a run. Then the horse would take off and run for a mile at
full speed.

On June 24, 1889, armed and wearing bandannas over their faces, Warner and
Cassidy made off with $21,000 or $10,500, depending upon whose story you
choose to believe.

The tale also varies as to what happened after the robbery, but it seems
clear that a posse did pursue the men out of town. One storyteller relates
that a particularly aggressive member of the posse suddenly found himself
dangerously close to the desperadoes and might have come within firing
range of the crack shots. But he was saved by the "call of nature."

A newspaper story after the event said the robbers covered the trail by
padding their horses' feet with gunny sacks and riding over rocks. Tom
McCarty said later that once when the posse neared them, they lassoed a
wandering Indian pony, tied a large branch to its tail and sent the pony
plunging down the mountain slope toward the pursuers. Thinking they were
being attacked by an "army of men," the posse and their horses stampeded
downhill, once again losing their quarry.

After knocking off a train at Stony Creek in July, the three eventually
wound up at Robbers Roost in south-eastern Utah, a favorite sanctuary of
renegades on the run. One day when Butch rode fifty miles into Greenriver
for supplies, a sheriff named Fares reportedly recognized him and followed
him out to arrest the gang. As Matt Warner told it, they relieved him of
his guns and sent him home without pants and horse.

Some time after this Butch split from his two henchmen to become a foreman
on an Opal, Wyoming, ranch. He later was described as the best man the
owner ever had. A bunkmate, George Streeter, called Butch a top hand, the
best-natured man he'd ever met and a crack shot. Describing Butch as a
short, thick man, he said the new hand could "ride around a tree full speed
and empty a six-gun into the tree, putting every shot within a three-inch
circle."

In 1892 Butch picked up a new partner, Al Hainer, and the two started a
ranching operation near Lander. This was wild country where stray livestock
was easily taken, and it was later noted that these new neighbors did a lot
of selling but little buying. In June of1893 the partners were arrested for
horse theft but were acquitted that same month.

Cassidy's fourth and last arrest was recorded in 1894. In an apparent
frame-up arranged by local ranchers, Butch and Hainer were accused of
stealing a horse which the so-called owner had stolen and sold to them for
$5. The Utah Historical Society says that a Deputy Claverly and an
assistant arrested Hairier and Cassidy, but not before Butch had suffered a
pistol slug through his scalp during a savage gun battle and "was subdued
only when the barrel of Claverly's pistol crashed into and fractured his
jaw.

"Sentiment was mixed in Lander, as it was all over the West at that time in
such cases," the report continues. "Cassidy was a friendly, likeable man.
The town had known him well, had liked him we!l, and he had done little
more than steal a few horses."

But he was convicted and sent to the Wyoming penitentiary on July 15, 1894.
He was pardoned by Governor Richards in January, 1896, after promising he
would stay clear of Wyoming operations in the future.

Whether it was the prison stint or simply the normal evolution of his life,
Butch Cassidy was now a traveler of the Outlaw Trail. The longest, wildest
and most-used in western history, the renegade route ran from Montana to
Mexico.

Along the trail were stopovers and hideouts for the outlaws. The
northern-most station was in Montana. Others were located at
Hole-in-the-Wall, Wyoming, Brown's Hole, Robbers Roost in Utah, Lee's Ferry
in Arizona, and in New Mexico. At Brown's Hole the newly-released ex-con
began to organize his fabled Wild Bunch.

A "hole" in western vernacular is any valley surrounded by mountains.
Brown's Hole was such a place, a thirty-five-mile area along the Green
River at the junctions of Utah, Colorado and Wyoming. With only three
steep, rocky trails leading down from its enclosure of lofty precipices, it
was an ideal sanctuary for the lawless. It was a rare lawman who ever
attempted to enter the Hole. With outlaws guarding its narrow entrances or
lurking in caves and cabins along the way, the Hole was no place for the
law.

For his most trusted lieutenant the intelligent Cassidy chose Ellsworth
"Elza" Lay, a handsome, well-educated easterner who reportedly took to the
trails after an incident with a drunk in Denver. The drunk was trying to
molest a woman on a horse car. Lay saw him and pitched him onto the street
with such force that the culprit appeared dead. The frightened Lay took off
and some time later showed up at Brown's Hole. By the time he met Butch, he
had pulled several jobs on his own and having served his apprenticeship, he
was ready to join forces with a pro.

Butch and Elza built a "roost," a small cabin on a high point of Diamond
Mountain. They spent that first winter there with Elza's wife, Maude, and
Butch's girl, Etta Place.

A beautiful woman, Etta enjoyed a colorful reputation among her neighbors
who said she'd shucked a husband or two and left two children to run off
with Butch.

And well she might have, for Butch was quite a catch. Cassidy was a sharp
dresser when he had money. He was good company in any gathering, bubbling
over with dry humor. He and his fellow "roosters" were a lively group, who
worked at deserving their nickname, the Wild Bunch. They attended the
dances in the valley and were known for their practical jokes and general
tomfoolery when the occasion warranted.

Etta and Butch were hardly "steadies," though. He spent a lot of time with
another woman named Josie Bassett that winter, and Etta later joined forces
with the Sundance Kid, as depicted in the recent film.

Cassidy and Lay's first big job together was the Montpelier Bank Robbery,
which took place on August 13, 1896. Assisted by another rooster, Bob
Meeks, they "withdrew" $7,165. With fresh relays of horses waiting on the
getaway route, Butch and Elza escaped unscathed. Meeks, however, whose only
role was to hold the horses outside the bank, was later identified by a
bank employee and spent several years behind bars.

For a while Butch and Elza holed up at Robbers Roost, another favorite
hideaway of the Wild Bunch. This was roughly 300 miles south of Brown's
Hole. Robbers Roost was an elevated plateau in the high desert of
southeastern Utah. Even today there are only three trails into the arid
fastnesses of the Roost. Only three or four springs water the area, and its
approaches are more dangerous than in any other area of the state. From the
Roost the outlaws could look from forty to sixty miles in any direction
across vistas of red and gold sand slashed by steep, raw canyons.

Despite the fact that Pinkerton detectives were constantly on the trail of
the desperadoes, any accurate chronological accounting of Butch's
activities is impossible. But it is known that on April 21, 1897, Cassidy
engineered the Castlegate Payroll Robbery to the tune of $8,000, which he
split with Elza Lay and Joe Walker. This job was Cassidy at his efficient
best.

Castlegate was rich local mining country midway between Brown's Hole and
Robbers Roost. The closest law enforcement was eight miles away at Price.
This location figured in the outlaw's careful planning. Joe Walker was
instructed to stay outside of town and cut the telegraph wires just before
the heist.

Knowing the proximity of the outlaw hideouts in the Castlegate region and
the frequency of the loosely-knit gang's forays against banks and trains,
the mining authorities were careful. The payroll came into town on the noon
train, was picked up there by the paymaster and carried up an outdoor
stairway to the company office on the second floor of a main street store
building.

Horses, the only possible means of travel for Butch and EIza, were scarce
in Castlegate and two strangers on saddled mounts would have been more than
a little suspect. Therefore, according to Butch's plan, they stripped the
horses of saddles and passed themselves off as race horse owners who had
ridden in during their exercise rounds. What their guns had to do with
exercise apparently went unquestioned.

The two waited until the paymaster, E. L. Carpenter, neared the foot of the
stairway before they demanded the money. He carried a satchel bearing
$7,000 in $20 gold pieces and two sacks, one containing silver and currency
amounting to over $1,000 and another holding $850 in small coins. The coin
bag was so heavy that it was abandoned.

Butch and Elza made it out of town without firing their guns, although a
few rifle shots dusted their heels. Posses were subsequently sent out from
two nearby towns, but with fresh horses waiting trailside and a couple of
swaps with ranchers enroute, the robbers soon rendezvoused with Joe Walker.

Figuring they would be less suspicious if not carrying too much money, they
transferred the take to Walker's saddlebags and sent him north toward
Florence Creek and Brown's Park. They were to join him there in a few days
when the dust had settled. In the meantime Cassidy and Lay laid a more
obvious trail toward Robbers Roost while the two posses converged behind
them.

As it turned out, the posses wound up trailing each other, thinking they
were closing in on the outlaws. They closed in, all right, and a rousing
gun battle took place at dusk between the two groups, each assuming the
other consisted of the wanted men. Luckily, their marksmanship precluded
physical damage. It was reported that Pete Burson fired a double-barreled
shotgun at Old Joe Meeks from fourteen steps away, missing not only Joe but
also his horse.

After a few days at the Roost, Butch and EIza headed for Brown's Hole to
split the money with the partner who awaited them. From there they turned
south toward New Mexico to allow a cooling off period in Utah and
elsewhere.

In New Mexico Butch took the name Jim Lowe and Lay became William Maginnis.
They went to work for the WS Cattle Company in Alma for a time until the
Pinkerton men began poking around once more.

The WS spread was managed by Capt. William French, who didn't mind when
Butch hired as hands several of his Wild Bunch. Later French wrote about
Cassidy and Lay:

"Jim Lowe was a stocky man of medium build, fair complexioned. He had a
habit of grinning and showing a row of small, even teeth when he talked."

Maginnis, he said, was younger, tall, dark, good looking and a bit of a
swaggerer. Their cowhand friends were orderly in the town saloons and
seemed unlimited in number. They came and went at will, but there were
always others ready to sign on at the WS.

Meantime, the Spanish American War began, and many an outlaw, as patriotic
as the next man, volunteered. There was even some talk of forming a Wild
Bunch Brigade. As the war escalated, so did beef prices and rustling.

On July 11, 1899, at Folsom, New Mexico, another Cassidy-style robbery took
place. Although Cassidy may have been involved in the planning, Lay and
others did the job. A sheriff was killed in the resultant shootout, and Lay
was badly wounded and arrested. He was convicted and put away until 1906.

In prison Lay helped to quell two prison riots and consequently became
quite a favorite of New Mexico Governor Otero, who reduced his sentence.
Apparently Lay had $50,000 stashed away from earlier robberies. With this
he operated a saloon for a while in Shoshoni, Wyoming, then married and
moved to Calexico, California. He died in Los Angeles in 1934 and is buried
in Forest Lawn Cemetery.

Perhaps it was Lay's arrest that led Butch to make his abortive attempt at
the straight life when he sought employment with the Union Pacific. But the
gods were against it.

Butch now joined up with the Sundance Kid, Harry Longabaugh, from Sundance,
Arizona.

On September 19, 1900, hoping for a new start in South America, they
swooped down on another bank. With Bill Carver, another top rider from the
Wild Bunch, they held up the Winnemucca Bank in Nevada. They picked up
$32,640 and headed for Fort Worth, Texas, to celebrate.

In Fort Worth the well-heeled trio met two other members of the Bunch,
decked themselves out in modish duds and had a group picture taken in a
classic formal pose. Butch thoughtfully sent a copy of the photo to the
Winnemucca Bank, thanking the authorities for their contribution. An
enlargement of the photo still hangs in the bank.

With a comfortable amount of cash in their pockets, Cassidy and Sundance
looked wistfully toward South America. Early in 1902 Sundance, with Butch's
old girlfriend Etta Place now his constant companion, met Butch in New York
City. After doing the town, they sailed to Buenos Aires, later settling on
a ranch near the Chilean border.

In his biography of Cassidy, The Outlaw Trail, Charles Kelly says Cassidy.
and Longabaugh "terrorized the country on both sides of the Andes and
became the most wanted outlaws in South America."

Kelly presents a dramatic account, much like that in the film, of an ambush
by a Bolivian cavalry unit. According to this story the Americans had left
their rifles with their saddles outside a tavern where they had stopped for
a drink. With only hand guns and little ammunition, they were lost.
Sundance was mortally wounded before Cassidy reportedly used his last two
bullets to shoot first his partner and then himself.

There is much that is incredible about this tale, not the least of which is
that two wily, wanted criminals would let themselves be separated from
their principal weapons.

At any rate, writer Pearl Baker, in The Wild Bunch at Robbers Roost, states
with certainty that Butch and Sundance did return to the states and that
Cassidy may have died in Oregon in 1937.

After the film made Sundance famous, a man came forth who says the outlaw
was his father and calls himself Harry Longabaugh, Jr. The younger man, who
has lectured about his father and his cohorts in several western states,
says he saw Butch Cassidy in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in 1933 and learned
that the two men who died in Bolivia were not our famous duo. Butch and
Sundance had been in the town that day, he said, but they took off after
the shooting.

According to Fern Lyon, writing in the November-December 1973 issue of New
Mexico magazine, the younger Longabaugh said his father died in Casper,
Wyoming, in 1958 at the age of 98. Etta Place reportedly died in Oregon in
1949.

Thus it appears that Butch Cassidy might fillally have managed to leave the
outlaw trail and to find a more comfortable path to anonymity in his old
age. He had been looking for obscurity that snowy day when he waited for
the Union Pacific men at Lost Soldier Pass. But for the weather, he might
have succeeded, and one of the most colorful chapters in the history of the
Wild West might never have been written.



ELFEGO BACA : THE "BAD" MAN OF SOCORRO

by Steve Ross

The year was 1884 and a lone boy of nineteen was holed up in a small jacal
in the town of Francisco, New Mexico. He was an American of Mexican
descent, not a safe thing to be in the years after the Civil War when
Texans, their hearts still full of frustrated fight, were spilling into the
area, taking Over at the point of a gun and abusing Mexicans, considerin~
them as non-people who simply had to be gotten out of the way so the Texans
could have free use of the country as rangeland for their cattle.

Eighty Texas cowboys had been firing into the jacal for a day and a night.
Over three hundred bullet holes were later to be counted in the door alone.
Over 4,000 rounds would be fired into the tiny house before the shoot-out
was over. From his besieged position, the boy had already killed and
wounded a number of the Texans.

Late that night, dynamite had been thrown at the house, caving in a third
of the structure. The cowboys had poured many more rounds into the
remaining part of the structure for good measure, and then camped around
the house waiting for dawn to go in and pick up the remains. When the first
rays of sunlight illuminated the jacal, they were amazed at the smoke
rising from the crumbling remains of the chimney. Inside, Elfego Baca was
making himself breakfast!

In the borrowed jacal, Elfego had found beef, coffee and corn meal. He had
made tortillas from the corn meal, and was leisurely fortifying himself
with a good meal in preparation for another day of fighting.

Later, a cowboy was to claim in court that a loaded .45 aimed point-blank
at Elfego Baca and fired until empty would have no effect upon the life of
the young Chicano. The story behind this shoot-out, and other incidents in
the life of Elfego Baca, would make him a living legend in the Southwest.

A startling illustration of the respect which he had engendered in his part
of the country, from his boyhood on, is the unique manner in which he began
to carry out his duties as sheriff of Socorro County, New Mexico. In 1919,
at the age of 54, he was elected to that position. Upon taking office he
did a singular thing, with singular results. It was surprising to newcomers
to the area, but not to anyone who knew anything about the life and
exploits of the man. What he did was assemble all outstanding arrest
warrants and write a note to the subject of each informing him that he,
Elfego Baca, was expecting the wanted man to turn himself in. Many on the
wanted list were desperados whose respect for the law was nil, and whose
attendance at a sheriffs office on their own volition was hard to imagine.
It took a little time for the word to reach some of them, but within a
relatively short period of time, each recipient of a note appeared at
Baca's office as directed!

He was born in 1865 in the town of Socorro near the place where his father
had a small cattle ranch. Life was risky business for a "Mexican," with
Texans aggressively moving into the area. The battle of the Alamo in 1836
still engendered bitterness in the hearts of Texans. And then there were
the economic reasons Texans had for paying little attention to the rights
of the native population. The power in the area soon fell to the Anglos.
Law and order depended more on who had more men and guns to back him than
on judicial niceties.

The Baca ranch failed and the family (Francisco and Juanita, and their sons
Abdenago and Elfego) moved to Topeka, Kansas. Things were a little more
civilized there. There was less prejudice toward Mexicans, and the sons
could have the opportunity of better schooling. Francisco did well as a
small contractor for fourteen years. Then Juanita died, and Francisco,
feeling lonely and homesick, decided to move back to New Mexico to be near
the large Baca clan.

The fifteen-year-old Elfego and his older brother went on ahead to stay
with an uncle in Socorro while their father wound up his business affairs.
It was during this time that Elfego briefly came in contact with Henry
McCarty, alias William Bonney, alias Billy the Kid. They seemed to have hit
it off and were friendly for a short period of time.

Soon, his father was back in New Mexico and obtained the job of marshal in
the town of Belen, Socorro County, not far from the town of Socorro. In the
performance of his duties, Francisco one day found himself in a gun battle
with two cowboys from the area of Los Lunas. When the smoke cleared, both
cowboys were dead. Francisco had not started the fight; he was the local
peace officer; he was being shot at with intent to kill--nevertheless, he
was a "Mexican" who had killed two "white" men. With the help of other
Anglos, the nmrshal from Los Lunas came and arrested Francisco for murder.
He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to a long prison term.

Elfego, now seventeen, thought it unfair. And it was about this time that
he began thinking about being a lawman himself. Someone, he felt, had to
right some of the injustices which were being perpetrated--especially
against his people, the Mexican-Americans. His goal, he determined, was to
become an "A-1 peace officer and a criminal lawyer."

In the meantime, he had no intention of allowing his father to languish in
jail. Quickly, before his father could be moved to a state prison, he made
his move. He and a friend went to the local jail in Los Lunas where his
father was still being held. It was the night of a fiesta, and everyone
including the jailers were celebrating. Elfego and his friend found a
ladder which they used to obtain access to the second floor courtroom above
the jail. Then they sawed a hole in the floor and pulled Francisco to
freedom. Francisco headed south and remained free for the rest of his days.
It was believed that the escape was the work of Elfego, but nothing could
be proved and the matter was dropped. Only in later years did Elfego admit
the details and the truth of the story.

Two years later, Elfego was involved in the incident which established his
reputation. Socorro, the county seat, was a rough town not unaccustomed to
violence and bloodshed. But the worst place in the county was the small
town of Francisco. It was in the middle of a vast area of range country
which had mostly been taken over by Texans. The law was the six-shooter,
and the amusement of the cowboys was victimizing the Mexican townspeople in
whatever way their imagination could conceive. Shooting up the town every
weekend had become a tradition with them. The conflicts of the time were in
sharp focus in and around Francisco: Anglo versus Mexican, Texan versus New
Mexican, cowboy versus farmer, cowboy versus townsman.

In Socorro, Elfego was working for a relative who owned a small store. He
was already admired for his sharpshooting with a six gun, and his light
duties at the store included protection of the owner and property.

One day, a store owner, Pedro Sarracino from Francisco, showed up in
Socorro and told the awful tale of a Mexican having been castrated by
Texans just for the fun of it--right in Sarracino's store, on his counter.
He had been threatened with his life if he tried to interfere and a man
named Martinez, who had tried to stop it, had been tied to a tree and shot.

Sarracino was afraid to return to Francisco, and asked Elfego for help.
Elfego found a badge of a mail-order variety and pinned it to his vest. He
took his two Colt six-shooters with him and accompanied Sarracino back to
Francisco. He spent a day observing the goings on, which were abominable
from the point of view of the native population. He then appealed to the
local Alcalde (Justice of the Peace) who refused to do anything for fear of
his life, and who rejected Eftego's offer of help.

At that moment, a cowboy named McCarty from the famous Slaughter Ranch was
in the process of shooting up the town and generally terrorizing the
townspeople. Elfego, guns drawn, went up to McCarty, who was surrounded by
his friends, and arrested him. He brought the man to the Alcalde who, even
more fearful than before, refused to hear the case.

Elfego decided to take his prisoner to Socorro in the morning, to be tried
there, and bedded down for the night in the Sarracino house. Before long
the word had spread, and the foreman of the Slaughter outfit, accompanied
by many of his men, showed up at the Sarracino house demanding the release
of Elfego's prisoner. Elfego stepped outside and informed them that he
would start firing at the count of three if they did not disperse. They
were amazed at his effrontery and could not believe that he meant it. The
foreman, on his horse, moved up aggressively toward Elfego. They would call
his "bluff." Elfego responded true to an edict he had set for himself, and
to which he held throughout his life: "Never say you are going to do
something unless you intend to do it." At the count of three, he opened
fire. He was not then shooting to kill. He wounded one man in the leg, and
shot the foreman's horse.

Unfortunately the horse reared, throwing the rider and falling on the
foreman, crushing him. Now, a Texan was dying--and an upstart Mexican was
challenging the Anglo might. It was a bad situation. The crowd dispersed,
but only to gather reinforcements and drum up hatred. Scores of cowboys
were in town by morning, loaded with alcohol and bullets and spoiling for a
fight.

To avoid more bloodshed, some cooler-headed Anglos arranged with Elfego to
have McCarty tried in town by an "American'" Justice of the Peace. McCarty
was tried, found guilty, and fined five dollars.

When Elfego stepped out of the building where the trial had been held, he
was confronted by a mob of Texans, He quickly slipped away to a nearby
house whose Mexican-American occupants he convinced would be safer
elsewhere. It was a small jacal made of upright posts. The cracks between
the posts were idled with mud, much of which had fallen away. This was an
advantage for Elfego because he could use the narrow crocks between the
posts as firing ports--he could see, and fire, in all directions through
these openings.

The mob advanced on the jacal and demanded that the "dirty little Mexican"
come out--to be lynched. The man in the lead went up to the door and
claimed he'd bring Elfego out himself. He was dropped by two bullets. As
his friends carried him away, Eftego held his fire. He was still not
shooting to kill, and made no attempt to finish off the wounded man or pick
off the vulnerable cowboys carrying away the wounded man.

But then the Texans took up positions around the house and began pouring in
bullets. For the rest of that day, that night, and part of the following
day--thirty-six hours--Elfego held off eight Texans trying their damned
best to kill him. It took steely nerves and a sharp eye, to stay alive in
that situation. Elfego was also aided by the fact that the inside dirt
floor of the jacal was more than a foot lower than the level of the ground
outside the house. He could lie prone in that shelter when the fire was
heavy, then get up to pick off more venturesome attackers.

At one point, burning torches were thrown on the roof of the house to burn
him out. But the dirt roof would not catch fire. During the night, dynamite
was thrown at the house, but by now the cowboys were so in awe of Baca's
staying power and sharp eye that no one would approach in the night to
ascertain whether he was alive or dead.

It was decided to wait for dawn to check the house.

At dawn they saw the smoke from Elfego's breakfast rising from the chimney.

Finally, late in the afternoon, a truce was declared and a deputy sheriff,
accompanied by Francisco Naranjo, a native of Francisco whom Baca trusted,
came close to the jacal to palaver with Elfego. Elfego agreed to accept
arrest by the sheriff only if he were allowed to continue to carry his
guns. This was agreed to and Baca, the "prisoner," walked alongside the
sheriff with a hand on each gun ready for anything. He was accompanied to
Socorro by the sheriff, and it was understood by all that if anyone tried
to interfere it would mean the instant death of the sheriff, in Socorro,
among friends, he agreed to surrender his guns and he jailed awaiting
trial. He could have broken out easily with the help of friends, but chose
not to. After a long and involved trial, he was fully acquitted.

One year later, he made a play which indicated the reputation he had
already acquired. He again took on a town single-handedly, but this time
without bloodshed. A Baca named Conrado, owner of a combination store and
saloon in a nearby mining and cow town called Kelly, came to Socorro to
appeal to Elfego for help. His place was being taken over by miners and
cowboys who were helping themselves to whatever they wanted. They would
point a pistol in Conrado's face when he asked for payment. Elfego said he
would accompany Conrado back to Kelly. But Conrado refused to return for
fear of his life, and elected to wait in Socorro until Elfego came back
with news that it was safe to return. Elfego set out alone. When he got to
the store-saloon in Kelly, he found miners and cowboys making themselves at
home, taking shots at various fixtures and draining the liquor supply.

He stood at the end of the bar for several minutes sizing up the situation.
Then, placing his hands on his two Colts, ready for action, he announced in
a loud voice that the festivities had come to an end. This brought a
reaction of disbelief and anger, and guns were reached for. Elfego quickly
drew his guns. Outnumbered about forty to one, he stood waiting for a move
on their part. It was a tense situation.

"Who the hell are you? snarled one of the miners.

"I am Elfego Baca."

The effect of this statement was extraordinary. The men turned sheepish and
apologetic. They claimed they were just having a little fun, that they
didn't mean any harm and would pay for all damages and merchandise
consumed.

During the next few years, Elfego was a deputy sheriff and deputy United
States marshal. He collected enough scars from knife cuts and bullet wounds
to attest to the daring and dedication with which he performed his duties.

By 1890, he decided to enter another phase of law. He began reading law in
the office of a Socorro judge with whom he was on good terms, and four
years later he was admitted to the New Mexico bar.

His career as a lawyer was as colorful as his earlier, and later, career as
a law enforcer. Courtroom decorum meant little to him when he felt
injustice was being done. Often the injustices involved Mexican-Americans
whose rights he had vowed to protect. With some judges, and opposing
counsel, he got along fine; others came to fear his presence in court. If a
judge ordered him out of court for disrespect, Elfego not only would not
retire, but no court officer moved to carry out the judge's demand that he
be removed. Elfego's reputation remained such that there were few who dared
tangle with him personally.

On one occasion, intensely angered by the behavior of a judge in a
particular case, he openly called the judge-in a full courtroom--"corrupt
and personally immoral." This estimate proved to be more than mere
hyperbole. That judge was soon after removed from office for the very
reasons Elfego had mentioned.

He involved himself in local politics, and at one time or another held the
offices of Mayor of Socorro, County School Superintendent, county clerk,
assistant district attorney and district attorney.

During these years he took some time off to track down a Mexican cattle
rustler who had ventured north of the border to raid. There was a sizeable
reward and Elfego was tempted by the money and the adventure. He trailed
the rustler into old Mexico, and was about ready to confront him when word
reached Baca that the reward had been cancelled. Well, if they didn't want
him that badly, Elfego concluded, there was no reason for him to bother
about it. Since he ,had gone that far, he decided to introduce himself to
the rustler, who had a fearsome reputation in those parts--Pancho Villa.
They took a liking to each other, and for a short time were partners in an
unprofitable mining venture. After his return to New Mexico, Baca was to
hear from Villa again--friendly for a brief time, then decidedly hostile.

During the days of 1910-1911, when Madero's revolution ousted Porf'mo Diaz,
there was much excitement south of the border. Elfego decided to see for
himself what it was all about. Through his friendship with Villa, he met
Madero and Generals Carranza, Huerta, Orozco, and Salazar, and was an
observer of some of the battles and quarrels which developed among the
revolutionists themselves. When Huerta became president of Mexico several
years later, he named Baca as his American representative and engaged
Elfego as attorney to represent General Salazar who had fled across the
border after defeat in battle. Salazar was being held by American
authorities for violation of American neutrality, and it was Baca's job to
free him. Villa, now an enemy of Huerta, swore he would kill Baca for
becoming a Huerta man. Given Villa's temperament, his frequent raids across
the border and his many ardent sympathizers north of the border, it was not
an idle threat.

Elfego was unable to do anything for Salazar through legal channels. It was
then that there occurred an incident involving a most interesting
coincidence, it led to rampant SPeculation among those who knew Baca.
Salazar was being held at the Bernalillo County jail in Albuquerque. One
evening, two masked men overpowered the jailer, freed Salazar and, without
doubt headed south of the border. They made good their escape. The
coincidence is that at the exact time of the jailbreak, Elfego was in an
Albuquerque bar having a drink and repeatedly asking several respected
local citizens the time. His watch kept stopping every few minutes, it
seemed, and he needed to ask the time in order to reset it. When a charge
of being involved in the jailbreak was considered against him, his firmly
established presence elsewhere nullified any further action against him.

He further managed to anger Villa in a personal way by arranging, in a
complicated and still not fully known way, to obtain one of several
custom-made rifles which Villa had had made especially for himself. Villa
offered a reward of $30,000 for the return of his rifle and the death of
Elfego Baca. The reward was never collected, and Baca retained the rifle
for the rest of his life.

Throughout his career, Elfego was constantly getting into scrapes, each of
which would make a story in itself. Once, in El Paso, he was confronted by
a man named Otero who had a grudge against Baca. The man fired, slightly
wounding Baca in the groin. Elfego quickly returned the fire, killing the
man. Elfego was treated by a doctor and then taken to a friend's house
where he called the El Paso chief of police. He was informed that he would
have to stand trial for the killing. "Come yourself," he told the chief of
police. "If you send some cop who tries to get rough with me, you know
what'Il happen to him" The chief himself came to get Baca, and an El Paso
jury later acquitted him.

There was in Elfego's personality a fascinating combination of daring,
personal sense of justice, and humor. Earlier in his life when his cousin
Conrado had asked for his help in ridding Conrado's unwanted guests from
his business establishment in Kelly, Elfego had been so annoyed by
Conrado's fearful refusal to accompany him back to Kelly that he did a
puckish thing the day after his confrontation with the miners and cowboys.
He declared an "open house" and invited anyone to come and take whatever
they wanted from the shelves for that day.

Later in his life, when he was sheriff of Socorro County, he was annoyed by
a new law which put debtors in jail until they could pay their debts.
Often, the debts were small amounts, and Elfego's jail was filled with poor
people who, he reasoned, could never get around to paying their debts while
locked up. And they were an expense to the county, often far beyond the
sums they owed. He took it upon himself to allow all debtors to go free and
told the infuriated district attorney that he would refuse to reincarcerate
any of the debtors who would be reapprehended and brought back and would
not jail any new debtors brought to him. As a result of this action and the
controversy and reevaluation it caused, the law was repealed at the next
session of the legislature.

Late in his life, he moved to Albuquerque. Out walking one day, he became
incensed when he observed a policenmn roughing up a Mexican-American whom
Baca happened to know. He pulled out his large silver watch attached to a
long chain and swung the chain, crashing the watch across the policeman's
head. He was arrested and sentenced to thirty days in jail. He calmly
allowed himself to be taken to the local jail where he entered his name as
prisoner and then released himself on his own recognizance. Unknown yet to
the judge, Elfego had just days before obtained the new job of jailer.

After a long and eventful life, he died peacefully in Albuquerque. in
August, 1945, the Albuquerque Tribune carried the headline:

                      ELFEGO BACA, OLD FRONTIER LINK,

                       GUNFIGHT HERO, DIES HERE AT 80



BLACK BART : THE POET BANDIT

by Arthur Moore

San Francisco was becoming a metropolis the year Black Bart appeared. It
was settling down from the hectic period of the gold rush that had started
it all. The Barbary Coast still had its course to run, but civilization was
creeping closer. The popular get-rich-quick idea had evaporated; people
were willing to work for wages again or to start their own businesses. The
railroad had come across the Rockies and it looked at last as if the land
would be conquered and stable one day soon.

The once riotous and wild gold mining camps of California were abandoned,
or had grown from camps to small villages and towns. The gold rush had been
ebbing fast by 1854. When the placers were worked out, rnany of them by
1860, men moved on. A few had struck it rich and kept what they had made,
most returned home or put the shovels and picks aside and became,
carpenters or farmers again. A great many ex-gold mining camps were
destroyed by fire and some by flood.

There were still mines, to be sure, but after the financial depression of
1855, farming and ranching became more important. The saloonkeepers,
gamblers and hangers-on departed, leaving the land in the hands of more
permanent residents. The soil was good, rainfall plentiful and the climate
generally mild. Farming and ranching had been the life of California before
the transients, and now it returned to put down even deeper roots.

John A. Sutter, the man who had tried to suppress the news of the discovery
of gold, was the real founder of agriculture in the state. With the immense
jump in population food prices spiraled upward. Growing food quickly became
far more profitable than digging for gold. Many forty-niners bought land
with gold and began seeding and plowing. Twenty-five years after the gold
rush started there was hardly any trace of it remaining. Then one day Black
Bart came along.

The year was 1875, only one year before Custer met all those Indians at the
Little Big Horn. It was Calaveras County--the very same one Mark Twain made
famous with his jumping frog story.

Black Bart took up his chosen profession as stage robber. He was to become
the most unique practitioner of that calling in the West.

The West, and long-suffering Wells Fargo in particular, had seen many a
stage robber. Most were unimaginative types who were often vicious and
always greedy. The Butterfield Overland Mail & Express stages had been
fighting the problem for years. All too often their drivers had been shot
off the boxes without warning. The passengers were routinely robbed and
molested, sometimes the team horses stolen or destroyed.

How Black Bart went into stage robbing is not known. He served no
apprenticeship--he always worked alone--and the method he devised for his
first job was never changed. Except once, but more of that later.

He was unfailingly polite. To stage drivers he had only two commands. The
first: "Throw down the box!" spoken in a deep, authoritative voice. When
that was done, he ordered, "Get along," and the stagecoach got moving
again. There were a few times when women passengers, frightened by his odd
appearance and the weapon he held, tossed out to him their purses. Black
Bart never failed to return them, saying he wanted only the mail bags and
the strong boxes. He never robbed or touched a single passenger.

Even more unusual, he never once fired his shotgun in the commission of any
robbery. Later, during a frantic scramble during one holdup, Bart was fired
upon by a driver. But he did not return the fire. Maybe the shotgun was not
loaded ... ?

He was a most peculiar little man. His modus operandi was simple. He would
take up station along a lonely stretch of stage road, always on a difficult
hill where the stage had to go slowly, or on a sharp bend. He wore a linen
duster over his clothes and a flour sack with cut-out eyeholes over his
head and over his derby hat. He carried a double-barreled shotgun.

When the horse drawn stage appeared he would step out quickly, the shotgun
held steady, and call out his command. Usually he placed himself in front
of the horses, stooping to make a smaller target in case the driver
attempted to fire at him. In general the drivers of

the twenty-seven stages he robbed were happy to kick the treasure box off
into the road and to whip up the horses.

Black Bart then used an old axe to break open the wooden express box. He
had to go rnany miles to get to the stages--and many miles back, not
counting the danger. And for all his work he was poorly recompensed. He had
come on this avocation late in life, and had missed the boat, so to speak.
The mines were few now; the days of the richly-laden stages had passed.
None of Bart's robberies netted him very much. His last was the biggest
haul, but that was mostly recovered by Wells Fargo.

His immediate successes and his appearance--the duster and flour sack were
unmistakable--made him known to all. The newspapers happily went to work
with suppositions and conjectures. In a few years they had built Black Bart
to the skies, a fantastic pyramid of pure fantasy. He was invincible, nine
feet tall and bulletproof.

Wells Fargo's chief of detectives, James B. Hume--an ex-sheriff of El
Dorado County--was cudgeling his brains over the few real clues he had. The
trouble was that Black Bart did not fit any of the molds. He was not
vicious or violent, and he came and went like a spirit.

But there was one thing more--the thing that really made him famous and
endeared him to the hearts of San Franciscans and millions of others... his
poetry.

He signed himself Black Bart, the PO 8, clearly defining his own literary
attainments. He did not leave a poem every time he robbed a stage, in fact
he left only a very few poems, but no other stage robber used such an
engaging and theatrical device. It was bound to get him attention, which
was probably why he did it. He quickly became a legend.

On the day he held up the Quincy to Oroville stage and relieved the driver
of the green Wells Fargo box he left behind what became the most famous of
his lines. It was written on the back of a waybill in neat, meticulous
handwriting:



Here I lay me down to sleep, To wait the coming morrow;

Perhaps success, perhaps defeat, And everlasting sorrow.

I've labored long and hard for bread For honor and for riches,

But on my corns too long you've tred You fine-haired sons of bitches.

Let come what may, I'll try it on, My condition can't be worse,

And if there's money in that box, 'Tis money in my purse.



The discovery of gold in California was the spark that fired Henry Wells
and William G. Fargo to form the historic company. Wells Fargo & Company
started in New York City, March 18, 1852. It proposed to compete with the
Adams Express and other companies in the gold fields. There were no
railroads then, and so there was a desperate need for honest, dependable
service.

The miner simply took his gold dust to the nearest Wells Fargo branch
office. An agent weighed the gold and gave the miner a receipt. That ended
the miner's responsibility-and he liked it that way. Wells Fargo then
became responsible for delivering it or for acting as banker.

Wells Fargo's operation was an immediate success. The company's word was
good as gold. The first few offices expanded into twelve in the Mother
Lode, then expanded into the Comstock Lode country. It became the largest
and most powerful of all express companies within a few years. By the
middle 1860's Wells Fargo owned the greatest staging empire in the world.
It carried goods and mail--indeed anything that could be transported. When
the famous Pony Express was formed, it sent the US Mails across country
from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California... in five days.

Since the firm carried so much bullion, it developed its own police force
to bring to justice the hundreds of bandits who sought riches the easy
way... at the end of a gun. Many of these special agents were ex-lawmen,
like detective Hume.

James B. Hume was a diligent and careful man. He was tall and wiry, a
handsome man, according to his photographs. He did his best to capture that
poet stage robber, Black Bart, having no idea at first that it would be so
challenging. Hume's first act was to discover if anyone besides the drivers
and occasional passengers had seen the robber. He combed the hills for
clues. a number of people had seen and He found that talked to a stranger
on foot, a short, well-dressed man of perhaps fifty years of age, with blue
deepset eyes, gray hair, moustache and chin whiskers. And he looked like a
wandering preacher or school teacher. This man was polite, people said, and
talked easily

Was it possible he was Black Bart?

Hume decided, after considerable investigation, that it had to be. Wells
Fargo issued a confidential circular on the man and his methods, describing
the linen duster, the flour sack and the shotgun--not forgetting the old
axe with which the bandit smashed treasure boxes. He always left the axe
behind. In opening mail sacks Black Bart cut them with a sharp knife in a T
slit.

He had another peculiarity. In a vast land, in a time when everyone rode
horses or drove buggies, Black Bart walked.

He was a phenomenal walker, covering amazing distances up and down hills
and across country, lugging his suitcase. He stopped various times at
farmhouses and small villages and was always described by those who met
him--not knowing who he was--as well-informed, pleasant and courteous. He
was about five feet, seven inches, of slender build, they said, and
straight as an arrow. He had a high forehead, deepset eyes, a moustache and
chin whiskers. He did not drink or smoke but he liked coffee. Because of
his respectable appearance he could stop for food without anyone ever
suspecting him of being the notorious bandit.

Once, in 1882, a Wells Fargo driver saw his chance and got in a couple of
shots at him. It was on the Laporte to Oroville run. Before Black Bart got
quite out of sight, the driver grabbed a gun, firing several times. The
horses reared and jerked the stagecoach. No one was hurt. Black Bart
disappeared into the hills.

Detective Hume could not run him to earth. When he pored over the poetry,
one of his few clues, Hume found them of little help. (The day of
sophisticated handwriting analysis had not yet dawned.) Bart's habit was to
write each line in a different way, slanting the letters forward or back
and making them of different sizes, as though to discourage identification.

He left his poems in the empty express boxes. They were gleefully printed
by the newspapers.

So here I've stood while wind and rain, Have set the trees a sobbin'

And risked my life for that damned box, That wasn't worth the robbin'.

He was driving the Wells Fargo detectives up the walls!

The robberies went on for eight years, three or four each year. No one
knows if Black Bart lived on the proceeds alone. If so he did not live
high. Wells Fargo posted a reward for him, of eight hundred dollars.

Then the end came quickly. About eight years after he had begun his bizarre
career, at the end of 1883, Black Bart stopped the stage coming from
Sonora. It is conjectured that he had information that the treasure box was
filled better than usual. At any rate it contained five hundred and fifty
dollars in cash, and over four thousand dollars in amalgam (a mixture of
silver and mercury).

He halted the stage in the same area where he had started his depredations.
When the coach appeared, horses laboring up a steep hill, Black Bart
stepped out as he always did, with the shotgun leveled. "Throw down the
box!" he ordered in his deep voice.

But this time things had been changed. Stage driver Reason McConnell could
not comply--for the simple reason that the box had been fastened to the
floor of the coach! Since the bandit always demanded the drivers "throw
down the box," what would happen if they could not?

If the company officials came to the decision hoping it would confuse Black
Bart, they were successful. The bandit was faced with the first change in
his technique since the beginning and it seemed to shake him. He had to
decide quickly whether to vary his method or to let the stagecoach go on
by, unrobbed.

He solved the problem. He commanded the driver to unhitch the team and walk
the horses forward over the crest of the hill leaving the coach itself
behind. (There happened that day to be no passengers.) Driver McConnell did
as he was directed.

However, there was one other factor in this particular holdup. A joker in
the deck. That difference was a youth, Jimmy Rolleri, nineteen years old.
Jimmy and McConnell were old friends. Early that morning Jimmy had decided
to go hunting with his Henry rifle. He hitched a ride with his friend the
stage driver, and got off as the stage started up the incline. He would cut
across country, he told McConnell, looking for game along the way. He would
meet the stage again as it came down the grade on the far side of the hill.

Life is sprinkled with coincidences, mostly small ones of course, but
occasionally a whopper comes along. This day the poet robber was faced with
a doozie. He held up the stage just after Jimmy hopped down to hunt.

Driver McConnell reported later that the bandit had seen the young man drop
off the stagecoach at the foot of the hill and demanded to know who he was.
McConnell replied that he was only a young boy who was out hunting for
strayed cattle. It seemed to satisfy the highwayman.

As ordered McConnell then took the team of horses over the hill. Black Bart
went to work with his axe on the treasure box inside the coach. He smashed
the box open and stuffed the contents into a sack.

On the other side of the hill McConnell attracted Jimmy Rolleri's
attention. Jimmy slipped around the slope and, when he came up, wanted to
know why McConnell was minus a stagecoach. Without wasting time on words,
McConneli grabbed the rifle and rushed to the crest of the hill. Black Bart
was just backing out of the coach with the loot in a sack and a bundle of
papers in his hand. McConnell fired and Bart ran for the trees. Three shots
were fired. Bart stumbled, dropped the papers, but disappeared into the
brush. Blood was later found on the papers.

McConnell did not chase the bandit. He hitched up the coach and he and
Jimmy hurried to the next town to report the robbery.

Sheriff Thorn of Cahveras County went out to the scene to see what he could
find. Thorn was a back county lawman, but intelligent and thorough. Near
the road he found a small derby hat. Behind a rock, where someone had
obviously waited a long time, he found the remains of food in several paper
bags, a leather case for a pair of opera glasses, a magnifying glass, a
belt, a razor, some dirty linen sleeve cuffs and two flour sacks.

Most important of all there was also a handkerchief, in the comer of which
was an inked code: F.X. O Seven.

Chief of detectives Hume had previously hired a special investigator, Harry
N. Morse, to concentrate on Black Bart. Under Hume's supervision Harry
Morse had been working on the case for about six months. Now finally there
was a tangible clue. Morse was given the handkerchief and told to track
down the laundry mark.

There were dozens of cities and towns and the laundry might be in any one
of them. Morse pondered the tiny numbers on the corner of the bit of cloth
and decided to try the San Francisco laundries first. He began checking and
discovered there were ninety-one. Doggedly he began calling on them.

It took a week. Morse examined the books of laundry after laundry. At last
he found the mark F. X. O Seven on the books of a hundry agency run by
Thomas Ware on Bush Street.

The mark identified a customer named C. E. Bolton. Bolton, Morse

found, lived in a small hotel, the Webb House, at 37 Second Street, room
40. The police set a watch on it and soon arrested the man.

Bolton made no trouble; he only protested his innocence. He was found to be
a man whom many city detectives knew well. He had been eating for years at
a Kearny Street cafe where the police often went. Bolton had even discussed
Black Bart, the notorious bandit, with them.

When accused, Bolton denied he was Bart. He had been born, he said, in New
York State; he was a veteran of the Union Army and had served with honor
and valor in the Civil War--he called himself a captain. (He was later
found to have been a sergeant.) He also had a wife in Missouri. At his
hotel he was said to be an ideal tenant, quiet and punctual about his room
rent. He claimed to be a mining man... but was vague about the location of
his mine.

Hume and his detectives were sure of him from the first. His description
matched perfectly the one that Hume had uncovered years before. Bolton was
a short, straight man with a gray moustache and chin whiskers. He had
sunken blue eyes, high cheekbones, and he was very polite. He dressed well,
liked derby hats, and wore a diamond stickpin and a diamond ring as well as
a gold watch and chain. Bolton was not his real name, he admitted. He had
been born Charles E. Boles.

Also Bolton had a bit of skin knocked off one knuckle. He said it was
because of a slight accident. Hume figured that one of driver McConnell's
bullets had touched him.

The derby hat found at the scene fitted him perfectly. Handwriting found in
his room matched very well the handwriting on the verses written by the
poet robber.

They questioned the quiet little man for some time. He finally admitted he
was the one who had held up McConnell. And he led them to a cache in the
woods where most of the loot was recovered.

Bolton, alias Boles, alias Bart was brought to trial and convicted-of one
robbery, the twenty-eighth. It is interesting that he was not accused of
the other twenty-seven. Despite all the trouble and expense Black Bart had
caused them, Wells Fargo was willing to settle for the one conviction...
perhaps it was because of Bart's age, fifty-five. It brought up charges
that Wells Fargo had made a "deal," which seems unlikely.

The highwayman, Black Bart, was sentenced in 1884 to six years in San
Quentin Prison.

He did not serve the six year term; he was released in January 1888,
swearing never to break the law again.

An interesting end note on the Black Bart affair occurred--according to the
newspapers--when Bart-Bolton-Boles was released from confinement. Reporters
crowded about him, several discussing with him the statement that he was
going straight thereafter.

One reporter then asked if Bart would write any more poetry.

"Young man," Bart replied, "I have just said I would commit no more
crimes!"

For many years Black Bart had been a legendary figure, bold and
successful--if not made much richer by his desperate acts. Other highwaymen
copied him. A few said, from behind masks, that they were Black Bart, but
none ever equalled the odd little man with the deep voice. He was a
will-o-the-wisp, here one day and far off the next, plodding across the
green hills in his derby hat, lugging his suitcase and his shotgun.

After his release there were stories that he had gone back to his
profession, but they were never proved. And there was no more poetry. James
Hume and his coworkers investigated the suspected cases and to a man
declared them not to have the real Black Bart's distinctire touch.



PEARL HART AND THE LAST STAGE

by Edw. D. Wood, Jr.

She was a little old lady, white-haired, wrinkled, and stooped... but with
a spirit which seemed to belie her years. This is how the clerk of the Pima
County Courthouse remembered her as she ambled into that building one hot
afternoon in 1924 and asked him "Can I look the place over?"

The clerk had no idea who she was. "Do you have some singular purpose for
your request, madam?" "I once lived here. I wondered if it had changed
any." He might never have known who the old lady was, except there was a
register all visitors must sign... and after he had shown her around the
building she said her name aloud, proudly. "Pearl Hart, that's my name!"
Then she left the premises and was never heard of again.

Where did Pearl Hart go? Some have said quite frankly, "in to oblivion."

Who really seems to care?

Well, history does.

Pearl Hart has the distinction of being the last stagecoach robber in the
United States. She robbed the Globe-Arizona stage line which was so active
in those parts during the turn of the century.

She was described as a young, slim "boy," as she held a six-shooter at the
passengers of the coach. (The coach, by the way, was a Concord made in
Concord, New Hampshire, rnainly for the Wells Fargo Company during the
1870-1887 period. There were only thirty made in all. The wheels were like
spindly-legged cuts of dry oak. The sides were open, and the body was
almost plywood in structure. Bullets could hit and race through from side
to side with no difficulty at all.) Pearl Hart knew this.

Drivers and their passengers inside the fragile shell were most reluctant
to anger the armed outlaws outside. Indeed they wouldn't have had a
fiddler's chance against a single road agent let alone two, one coming on
either side of the road. Ahd on this historic occasion, the two consisted
of a slim young "fellow" and an older, much heavier companion.

The driver had only three passengers on that ride. A Chinaman with full
queue, a drummer stereotyped as short and fat, and a dude with his hair
parted in the middle. This was the cast of the last stage holdup in the
West.

The driver, upon seeing the guns leveled on him from the road ahead, told
that he yanked in on the reins "... with a tug that set them on their
haunches!" He was referring to his passengers and probably was chewing
spitting tobacco and chuckling as he recalled the tangle of arms, legs and
heads. But it didn't matter at the moment... they were numb from flying
across the coach, back to front.

However it was the drummer who first shook his head in disbelief as he came
around and found himself staring into the big, round hole at the end of the
barrel of the six-shooter held in the nervous hands of the younger highway
"man." He could only blink in surprise at the situation. He certainly had
heard of stage robberies, but that always happened to somebody else...
never to him. But there it was, and there he was.

"Get up and line up!"

Although the hand shook nervously, the voice was determined--a bit
high-pitched, but determined.

The drummer knew from long experiences in other fields that a nervous one
was the most dangerous of all. Therefore he and his two riding companions
untangled themselves and did what they were told. They lined up along the
side of the coach and one by one they were permitted to lower their hands
to shell out their loot: the Chinaman, $5.00, the dude, $36.00, and the
drummer, a hefty $390.00.

Then, after searching them down the heavy man boomed like a bull moose.
"Get back in the coach," he said, "and if one of you looks back..." He
didn't need to say any more.

The passengers made almost as much of a tangle of themselves getting back
into the coach as they had at the abrupt, unscheduled stop.

The driver cracked his whip over the horses' flanks and the only thing the
road agents saw at that point was the east end of the coach heading west in
a cloud of alkali dust. No one looked back.

Moments later, when the sound of the coach trace chains and the driver's
whip had faded into the distance, the two road agents laughed heartily.
"Guess we did it Joe," the younger one said, and then "he" removed the
wide-brimmed hat and permitted the long brunette hair to cascade down over
the shoulders of the last stagecoach robber... Pearl Hart... an interesting
young girl who was as effective in boys' clothes as in female wardrobe, and
equally presentable.

Joe was Joe Boot who had at times tried his hand, unsuccessfully, as a
miner.

"You're a smart 'un, Pearl." There was tremendous admiration in his voice.
After all, Pearl had set the whole scheme into motion and convinced Joe
Boot to ride along with her. Neither of them knew the first thing about
such daring episodes, but Pearl had read the exploits of such road agents
as Black Bart, Rattlesnake Dick, Canada Bill, Tiburcio Vasquez, the
Fartington Brothers, the James Gang and many others--not all of them known
stage robbers, but then who was to say that they had not tried their hand
at the game at one time or another. And she also read of such women as
Calamity Jane, Hosenose Kate, Cattle Anne, Belle Starr and that Union spy
during the Tennessee campaign, Pauline Cushman.

Pearl wanted excitement and fame. She had always been a nervous little girl
and during her growing years she was what might be called a wallflower. But
as her late teens set in and her mind became actively involved with the
fiction and fact she absorbed, she knew she had to find her place also in
history.

Neither Pearl nor Joe Boot could possibly know, at the time of that stage
holdup, that they were making history in a big way. Nor could they know the
quirk of fate which was only seventy-two hours in front of them. In their
hurried ride away from the scene of the crime they ran into a blinding rain
storm. They couldn't figure which end was up and they rode around in
circles for the entire seventy-two hours. They were exhausted beyond human
endurance, with the rain stinging their bodies. Joe Boot began losing much
of the admiration he had had for his female companion who wanted to keep on
riding. Even a strong man, sooner or later, has to lay his weary head down
for strength-replenishing sleep.

There was no shelter to be found-no barn, ranch, shed or lean-to. They
slipped off their mounts and lay under the horses' bellies for whatever
shelter the animals might provide.

Actually this was not an uncommon procedure in the Old West. Many a rider
stretched himself out under his horse for protection of one sort or
another... the weather, pursuers, strangers in the night, bobcats or
snakes. A loyal horse would always let his master know if potential danger
lurked.

That night a passing rancher, who at any other time probably would not have
had any suspicions at seeing the sleeping couple, took note. In town, where
he had spent a few hours at the local saloon, which was the news spreading
media of the period, he had heard of the stagecoach robbery only a few
miles up the trail.

Pearl Hart and Joe Boot had not looked too carefully at the terrain in
their escape and the storm had added to their confusion. And so thay had
been riding around in a circle all those hours!

Knowing the robbers were still on the loose, the rancher became suspicious
and headed quickly back to town and to the sheriff... one William Truman.

The horses might have warned Pearl and Joe, either on the first advance of
the rancher or later on the approach of the sheriff and his posse... or
they might not. The two were so completely knocked out from days in the
saddle and exposure to the elements that they probably wouldn't have heard
anything anyway. If the crashing thunder couldn't keep them awake, then
certainly the whinny of their horses would be only soft music in the night.

They were awakened and captured without incident by the sheriff and his
posse. And there the story might have ended with their arrest, trial and
sentencing. But colorful outlaws of the Old West had a way of generating
publicity. Pearl couldn't know it at the time, but her name was about to be
linked with all her fact and fiction heros. At least for a time she would
realize her fondest wishes.

Word spread fast from village to the larger towns. The captive pair were
taken to Florence where a tremendous crowd was waiting for the pretty
little lady who had dared to don boys attire, strap on guns and had
threatened to use them. And, according to historians, she might have used
them under pressure through her nervousness.

We might look to her being led through the streets of Florence that very
hot Arizona day, hands tied to the saddle horn, her feet roped together
under the belly of her horse. She would have still been in the boys clothes
she wore during the robbery, bedraggled from those days in the saddle and
the elements of the weather, frightened to death of the crowd which she
faced. Crowds similar to those, during that period, usually meant a lynch
mob. However this particular crowd was not a lynch crowd. Suddenly they
began to cheer with an ear-pounding tempo. They shouted her name and gave
her words of encouragement, and acclaimed her actions. Those in the crowd
had found a new heroine for their eager attentions, for something new to
add to their own drab lives. They loved action and those who could give it
to them.

Pearl straightened her slim, tiny frame in the saddle. The cameras were
poised. The sheriff also wanted his picture taken with the prisoners for
his own political reasons, therefore he permitted the cameramen and the
newspeople aH the time they needed to get their film to the right exposure
and for the reporters to ask their anxious questions.

"Would you do it again, Pearl?" asked one of them. The crowd~ the
attention... Pearl Hart suddenly felt Very strong. She was suddenly the
bobcat, whereas all of her previous life she had been the pussycat, except
at that moment of the stage robbery when she knew she had some kind of
control. And too, her boarding school days had given her some kind of
insight to human relations. She knew she had something made, but what it
was... well, she'd still have to find out.

She took the role of the bobcat in answering the reporters' questions.

"Damn right, podner," she snarled.

Pearl had suddenly dropped all of her student years, the proper English
phrasing, and adopted the vernacular of the crude western character
(advanced to us to this day through western films).

Yuma Territorial Prison, where Pearl was sentenced to for a period of five
years, actually had no facilities for a female prisoner.

They simply didn't know what to do with this pretty little girl. Special
uniforms even had to be made for her. They couldn't have her running around
in the attire of the other prisoners. It just wouldn't seem right.

And so, for a time she had free movements within the conf'mes of the walls
of the prison themselves. And since she had become we!l-known--and in a
way, famous--as a woman stagecoach robber she was the curiosity of all
visitors. (But even to that moment no one could possibly have known just
how important to history she would be, that she had committed the last
venture of its kind. There was something about the fact that a woman had
done such a thing so late in the history of the stage lines that led to
some morbid curiosity about her.)

Pearl was Sought by all visitors to the prison and she was only too happy
to accommodate them, and give them her enlarged side of the story. She had
achieved even greater importance than she had that day in her ride down the
streets of Florence in the questions the visitors and the reporters and the
cameramen asked of her behind the walls. And Pearl evoked with her new,
crude language, a colorful character that could rival any and all of her
predecessors. She was really in her glory when posing for the cameras, and
for the historian it is too bad that most of those old prints have long
ceased to exist.

Although Joe Boot slipped quickly into obscurity shortly after Sheriff
Truman brought the outlaw pair into Florence, the pistol and rifle-toting
Pearl was just beginning to live, to be recognized, and to find her place
in history. And what she didn't conjure up in her own mind was created by
the newspaper accounts of her daring adventure into the badman's territory.
Altogether, these made her break out in the cold sweats of fame.

Time would be good in telling her just how famous she had become. But even
with that fame she too would slip into obscurity. But for the meantime
Pearl's fame was not to end with her release from prison. All the stories
printed about her in the papers and periodicals stirred the public's
imagination and they wanted to see her.

It was inevitable that a stage producer would contact this character who
had generated so much interest. She was a good property... a great
investment, and, then as now, whatever the people wanted to see was quickly
supplied by anyone who saw the commercial possibilities. Pearl was such a
demand... this petite, dainty little girl who masqueraded as a man, who
could handle so many weapons, who could brazenly stop and hold up a
stagecoach and rob its passengers.

Pearl, in her outlaw clothes, guns blazing, traveled around the country and
appeared on stage for a year as the "Arizona Bandit." In the best western
style she swaggered, cursed and produced all the villainous sounds as she
enlarged upon her exploits.

She had a year of ecstatic glory with the cheers of the public ringing in
her ears. And then night after night the audience became thinner and
thinner. The fickle public soon tires of even its most important heros.

It was then that she disappeared from the scene as quickly as she had
arrived upon it... until that 1924 visit to the Pima County courthouse. And
then, complete oblivion... for the woman who had pulled the last stagecoach
robbery.

WILD BILL HICKOK : OUTLAW FIGHTER

by Allan Morgan



Of all the lawmen of the early West, none was better known or more feared
than James Butler Hickok, known as Wild Bill. Yet he was not a lawman in
the sense that Bill Tilghman was, for instance. Hickok was not trained for
it, nor did he particularly seek a sheriffs or marshal's job. Like fame,
the jobs overtook him. He was an out-of-work Army scout when the first one
came along.

He is most remembered for his short stint as town marshal of Abilene during
that cow town's heyday. He had been a lawman first in Hays City, a lay-over
spot on the Santa Fe Trail, but Abilene, Kansas, made him nationally
famous.

In many of the pieces written about him and in the movies depicting his
life and times, this part of Wild Bill's life is emphasized. In these he is
called a fast-draw, dead-shot gunman. Only part of this is true. Wild Bill
lived just slightly before the classic western gunslinger period. His
favorite weapon was the Navy Colt--probably the favorite handgun of troops
of both sides in the Civil War. Wild Bill is shown in photographs carrying
two of them. The Navy was a fine pistol; an 1851 model Colt, cap and ball,
usually with a 7╜ inch barrel. But it was not a fast-draw gun--not in
comparison with the model 1873 Colt Peacemaker. The shorter barreled
Peacemaker was a cartridge gun and the classic western gunslinger's weapon.
This gun was barely available to civilians at the time of Hickok's death.

He was born in LaSalle County, Illinois, May 27, 1837. A farm boy, Hickok
grew up in a rugged land under hardship conditions. In his early years he
did many things: he ranched; served as a constable; did duty for a time as
a bodyguard to a general during the Kansas Free-State War; was a buffalo
hunter; and a drifter.

About 1859 he was a wagon driver on the Santa Fe Trail. This trail was one
of the three great ways West from the Mississippi River which was on the
edge of civilization in America. The first was the Oregon trail; the second
was the Missouri River, the route of Lewis and Clark; and the third was the
Santa Fe Trail which went from the Missouri River cutting south of Topeka,
Kansas, to Fort Dodge and then dividing. The north fork went through Bent's
Fort and thence to the old Mexican town of Santa Fe. The southern fork cut
through the Oklahoma panhandle. Years later the Atchison, Topeka and Santa
Fe Railroad largely followed the same route.

In his early years Hickok was no more than a laborer, a big, good-looking
youth. He drove stages, helped repair way-stations--and worked at every job
in these stations as all stage company employees did. In the spring of
1861, the year the Civil War started, Hickok was in Nebraska at the Rock
Creek Station of Russell, Majors and Waddell... of Pony Express fame.

At this place started the Hickok saga-myth-folk tale. Let it be said that
the real, living and breathing James B. Hickok needs no tall tales to
embellish his actual deeds. As a matter of fact too many of his true
accomplishments are now clouded by the myths told of him. He was an unusual
man. He did perform incredible feats--but probably not at Rock Creek
Station.

The truth can no longer be discovered; Hickok did become involved in a
fight with a man, David McCanles, and several others. Several were killed,
including McCanles. Hickok and two other men were arrested and charged with
murder but were never brought to trial. McCanles is sometimes shown as the
leader of a ferocious gang of killers, and Hickok is said to have slain
dozens in bloody hand-to-hand combat at Rock Creek. Neither story holds up.

Hickok went into the Union Army then, first as a mule-skinner, later as a
scout. The various units to which he was attached operated in Missouri,
Arkansas and the Indian Territory. He is credited with fantastic deeds of
derring-do, operating against the Confederates. He carried dispatches,
scouted enemy units to determine size and intent, and was chased and shot
at innumerable times. The record shows that he served bravely and well
because he was constantly in demand. He liked this life, was a restless man
at best, and became expert at tracking, scouting and getting out with a
whole skin.

After the war, in Springfield, Missouri, came the first of the pistol
confrontations which helped make his reputation. He fought a man named Dave
Tutt. Hickok and Tutt knew each other and were not enemies--until Susanna
Moore came along. Hickok had known Susanna became very cool. Hichok's
pride, never a small thing,. was suffering.

This fight was not a quick-draw contest. The two men met in a public
square. Tutt drew a pistol and fired first at Hickok, who already had his
Navy in his hand. (Some say a Colt Dragoon, which is a larger, heavier
model.) Hickok aimed carefully, taking his time, and shot Tutt through the
heart. This was clearly self defense, and no action was taken.

Somewhere along the way Hickok had collected the nickname, Wild Bill. Some
say it was because of his war deeds. Others attributed it to a
spur-of-the-moment yell, "Go get 'em, Wild Bill!" by a spectator who
watched him clear a saloon of toughs. At any rate, when in 1866 he became a
deputy marshal in Fort Riley, Kansas, he was popularly known as Wild Bill.
He liked the name.

He was beginning to build his reputation as a dead shot and as a dangerous
man to cross. He undoubtedly did everything he could to help that idea
along, because it made his job as lawman easier. To walk into a seething
deadfall (saloon), or to face a gang of heavily armed horse thieves as a
nobody was less promising of success than to walk in as Wild Bill Hickok, a
man who could deal death with either hand. Such a reputation made any
opponent nervous and more likely to make a mistake.

There was only one problem with owning a big reputation. Eventually someone
would try to usurp it--by killing the man who had it. It sometimes sounds
like dime novel stuff, but it was true that a man acquired a reputation as
a gunman and that others envied him and challenged him because of it. This
is the very thing that finally caused Hickok's death. This raw western
country was not the civilized East. It attracted desperate men, many wanted
elsewhere. Malcontents came, and others who were unable to buck the
competition in other places. It appealed to those out for excitement and
adventure and it contained traveling salesmen, known as drummers--some of
whom were very odd types. There were no tourists as we know the term today.
Emigrants with families usually camped out-of-town, away from the roaring
dance halls.

Some men gained reputations without wanting them, and few men with
reputations lived through the era. To keep from dying, the gunman developed
a sixth sense, a cat-like watchfulness at all times. He had to be ready to
shoot anywhere and everywhere. Such a man was pointed out wherever he went.
People got off trains to come and look at him, and he was a celebrity as
great as any movie star today. Hickok enjoyed his fame.

Two years after the war Hickok was again an army scout working out of Fort
Riley. He was also a courier, carrying messages through Indian country,
risking his life daily. The records speak for themselves. He was a very
valuable man, the most dependable and valuable scout in the army, some
said.

The Indian wars lasted about forty years, from the time of the Civil War to
1898. The last battle with soldiers was a small fight at Leech Lake,
Minnesota, with the Chippewa.

Indian uprisings were sporadic; they were often small but deadly thrusts by
wild-riding Redmen. The Indians, unfortunately for their cause, were for
the most part very undisciplined fighters. Tribesmen followed war leaders,
as long as they believed in them, but left the leaders abruptly when they
did not. Sometimes this occurred in the middle of a battle. Indians had no
knowledge of tactics, for the most part. As individuals they were superb;
as tactical groups they were dismal failures. (Custer happened to meet one
of the most overwhelming hosts of Indians ever assembled in one place on
the north American continent.)

Wild Bill's service against the plains Indians spawned many fantastic and
unbelievable stories. The flood of "yaller-backed novel" stories sprang
from this period of his life.

As a scout, Hickok lived on the frontier. Now he let it pass him by. He had
gained a tremendous reputation; maybe he wanted to see other aspects of the
land, no one knows. But in 1869 he was in Hays--or Hays City--Kansas. A man
of Wild Bill's standing could not stoop to manual labor to support himself.
He could not clerk in a store. He turned to gambling. (A great many
gunfighters of the West were gamblers.) Hays was a rough-tough town, an
emigrant's way-station. It harbored general stores for the necessities, and
a great many saloons, bawdy houses and gambling dens for the relief of
tensions.

It took a tough, no-nonsense man to keep such a town in line. Wild Bill was
one of those who could do it, so he was elected sheriff of the county and
entered a new phase of his career.

In Hays he laid down a set of laws and enforced them. In doing so he made
an enemy of a man named Strawhan, or Strawhorne, who attempted to kill
Hickok. Hickok entered a room and Strawhan pulled a gun when he thought
Hickok was not looking. But Hickok was always looking. (Old timers who knew
him say that the one thing they recall vividly about Hickok was that he was
"cat-eyed.")

In the case of Strawhan, Wild Bill drew his pistol and killed the man when
he saw Strawhan aim. This event gave rise to stories of his "lightning
draw." It is more likely that Hickok, noting the motion, drew his Navy and
fired. This was the gunfighter's "edge." He was always willing and ready to
shoot to kill. Wild Bill never bluffed. He never hesitated. (A few years
later he was to kill a friend because of this trait.)

Wild Bill Hickok was in Abilene as a gambler when he was tagged by Mayor
Joseph McCoy as marshal. At this time Bill was in his prime, taller than
most and handsome--as his photographs show. The reputation that preceded
him into Abilene was immense. Everyone knew of his deeds against the
Indians, and of his numerous combats in Hays and other towns. He was famous
and men gave him a wide berth.

One old-time Texas cowboy, recalling the day he came into Abilene fresh
from a cattle drive and had his first look at the renowned marshal, said of
Wild Bill: "He came out of Ben Thompson's Bull's Head Saloon. He wore a
low-crowned, wide, black hat and a frock coat. His hair was yellow and it
hung down to his shoulders. When I came along the street he was standing
there with his back to the wall and his thumbs hooked in his red sash. He
stood there and rolled his head from side to side looking at everything and
everybody from under his eyebrows--just like a mad old bull. I decided then
and there that I didn't want any part of him!"

Hickok stayed in Abilene during its most hectic period, eight months in
all. But his reign was characterized by protests and charges from both
sides, the townv people and the Texans, that Hickok did not really maintain
law and order; that he seldom interfered in brawls; that his own gun
ordinances were not enforced; that he allowed drunkenness on the streets;
that he sided with the madams and the gamblers--and so on.

He spent most of his time in the Alamo Saloon, gambling. He was
dissatisfied with his salary, less than Tom Smith had received, and with
his deputies. So he made himself available when he felt like it. Susanna
Moore was there, living with him--she bore him no ill because of Dave Tutt,
apparently. He also saw much of Agnes Lake, whom he later married. When
Mayor McCoy insisted, Bill did run certain elements out of town and he
closed some of the wilder dance halls and variety shows.

The famous Texas gunman, Ben Thompson, was in Abilene. There was bad blood
between him and Hickok, but the two never cared to face each other to shoot
it out. The quickest killer of them all, Wes Hardin, also met Hickok but
not in combat. There is a story that Frank and Jesse James, along with Cole
Younger, were all in Abilene and met with Hickok also.

Note that these professional gunfighters seldom faced each other with
hostile intent. They frequently growled at each other from a distance, as
Thompson and Hickok did, but they knew it was certain death for one or both
should they start shooting. The so-called "showdown" so dear to the movies
was very rare. (The battle at the OK Corral, years later, was the
outstanding example.)

The famous event, the shooting of gambler Phil Coe by Hickok, was the
beginning of the riotous era's end. Coe, a friend of Ben Thompson, was a
big, flamboyant man who seldom carried a gun. It is said that he and Hickok
fell out over a woman. The accounts vary but it seems that Coe was armed in
this instance and fired a shot in the street. Hickok appeared and attempted
to quiet the disturbance--Coe and others were celebrating, it seems, and
when Coe raised his pistol, Hickok fired with the usual results. Hickok's
detractors say it was deliberate because he disliked Coe.

A special policeman, Mike Williams, who was a good friend of Wild Bill's,
came running up from behind. Hickok, hearing only the running footsteps,
whirled and fired, killing Williams instantly.

Not long after this, Hickok was discharged by the town council.

He joined a show troupe, one of the typical wild west melodramas of the
time. It featared him as a great scout and frontiersman. The show toured
the eastern cities rescuing maidens from the savage Indiam and massacring
Redmen by the hundreds. But Hickok was not happy in this life. He was not
much of an actor; he had always enjoyed the limelight, but this was not his
thing.

He quit the show and returned to the West and became a gambler again. He
visited booming Wichita, another of the cattle towns, and tough Caidwell,
the "border queen." For a time he drifted. In Cheyenne, early in 1876, he
married Agnes Lake.

The black hills of the Dakotas were opening up to miners. Gold had been
discovered. Wild Bill, in company with his old friend, Colorado Charley
Utter, guided a company of miners into the wilds. In Deadwood, he and Utter
located mining claims and began to work them. There was talk that he would
be hired to clean up the town.

Deadwood was a different kind of town from the railheads and cattle towns
of Kansas... a little less savory. It was filled with get-rich-quick
scramblers; tin-horn gamblers; madams and girls; ex-buffalo hunters; mule
skinners; soldiers and freighters--not to mention all the bums and
no-goods. One of these was a broken-nosed man named Jack McCall.

It was Wednesday, August 2, 1876, the Same year that his friend Lt. Col.
Custer met his end, that Wild Bill sat in on a poker game in Lewis and
Mann's Saloon. Habitually Hickok sat with his back to the wall. This was
probably the one time in his life that he varied from that rule. It seems
the more curious since he had many

enemies in Deadwood who did not want to see him made town marshal.

Some of these enemies had primed Jack McCall, impressing on the bum that he
would acquire Wild Bill's fantastic reputation if he would only kill the
gunman.

When McCall walked into the saloon and saw Hickok's back exposed, he could
not resist, he put a gun to Hickok's head and pulled the trigger. Wild Bill
died instantly, as McCall ran out of the saloon. McCall was tried for the
crime and acquitted.

The following year he was again tried and this time hanged for murder.

Wild Bill was buried at Deadwood, and with his passing one of the chapters
of the West was closed. His thirty-eight years spanned two distinct periods
of the West, and he was famous in both. Much has been made of Hickok's
prowess with rifle and pistol. Yet he was not a gunman in the sense that
Doc Holliday was, or Bat Masterson or even William Bonney, alias Billy the
Kid.

He was a master of his weapons, there is no doubt of that. But unlike many
of the others he had something else too. He had a presence; men who knew
him spoke of his steady, hypnotizing stare. According to witnesses, he
often cowed a roomful of tough men by his personality alone. Note that he
lived through some of the most turbulent times, presented himself daily as
a target for any aspiring outlaw, and survived. He was feared by even the
most hardened, who did not trifle with him. He was a killer. He lived in a
different time, and by very different rules.

But with all his dexterity and coolness, his strength was not in his
weapons but in himself.



CONTRIBUTORS

Clayton Matthews is the author of over one hundred books of mystery and
suspense. In addition to short stories for Zane Grey Magazine he has
written the western novel Bounty Hunt At Ballarat.

Gary Brandner has a degree in Journalism from the University of Washington,
has written mystery fiction and a novelette and short story for Zane Grey
Magazine.

Arthur Moore was born and educated in California and took a particular
interest in the lore of the West. In addition to short stories for Alfred
Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine he has written the western historical novels
Storm Trail, Look Down, Look Down and Trackdown.

Chet Cunningham has worked with business motion pictures and has written
columns in trade journals. He is now a full-time free-lance writer and has
finished several western novels.

Allan Morgan was raised in Honolulu and has worked as a newspaperman and a
motion picture animator. He has written short stories for Ellery Queen's
Mystery Magazine and for Zane Grey Magazine.

Daniel T. Streib has a Master's degree in Journalism from the University of
Iowa and in addition to spy, detective and science fiction stories has
written for the screen.

Steve Ross is a graduate of UCLA, an editor and a widely published
free-lance writer with a deep interest in the American southwest.

Edw. D. Wood, Jr. has worked in the areas of western fact and fiction for
many years. The author of numerous books and articles he has also written,
produced and directed western feature films.