THE SCENE OF MANY HANGINGSTHE SCENE OF MANY HANGINGS
Ned Ray and Buck Stinson died full of profanity and curses, heaping upon their executioners all manner of abuse. They seemed to be animated by no understanding of a life hereafter, and were concerned only in their animal instinct to hold on to this one as long as they might. Yet Stinson, of a good Indiana family, was a bright and studious and well-read boy, of whom many good things had been predicted.
Dutch John, when faced with death, acted much as his chief, Henry Plummer, had done. He begged and pleaded, and asked for mutilation, disfigurement, anything, if only he might still live. But, like Plummer, at the very last moment he pulled together and died calmly. "How long will it take me to die?" he asked. "I have never seen anyone hanged." They toldhim it would be very short and that he would not suffer much, and this seemed to please him. Nearly all these desperadoes seemed to dread death by hanging. The Territory of Utah allowed a felon convicted under death penalty to choose the manner of his death, whether by hanging, beheading, or shooting; but no record remains of any prisoner who did not choose death by shooting. A curiosity as to the sensation of hanging was evinced in the words of several who were hung by Vigilantes.
In the largest hanging made in this Montana work, there were five men executed one after the other: Clubfoot George, Hayes Lyons, Jack Gallegher, Boone Helm, and Frank Parish, all known to be members of the Plummer gang. George and Parish at first declared that they were innocent—the first word of most of these men when they were apprehended. Parish died silent. George had spent some hours with a clergyman, and was apparently repentant. Just as he reached the box, he saw a friend peering through a crack in the wall. "Good-by, old fellow," he called out, and sprang to his own death without waiting for the box to be pulled from under his feet.
Hayes Lyons asked to see his mistress to saygood-by to her before he died, but was refused. He kept on pleading for his life to the very last instant, after he had told the men to take his body to his mistress for burial. This woman was really the cause of Lyons' undoing. He had been warned, and would have left the country but for her. A woman was very often the cause of a desperado's apprehension.
Jack Gallegher in his last moments was, if possible, more repulsive even than Boone Helm. The latter was brave, but Gallegher was a coward, and spent his time in cursing his captors and pitying himself. He tried to be merry. "How do I look with a halter around my neck?" he asked facetiously of a bystander. He asked often for whiskey and this was given him. A moment later he said, "I want one more drink of whiskey before I die." This was when the noose was tight around his neck, and the men were disgusted with him for the remark. One remarked, "Give him the whiskey"; so the rope, which was passed over the beam above him and fastened to a side log of the building, was loosened to oblige him. "Slack off the rope, can't you," cried Gallegher, "and let a man have a parting drink." He bent his head down against the rope and dranka tumblerful of whiskey at a gulp. Then he called down curses on the men who were about him, and kept it up until they cut him short by jerking away the box from under his feet.
A peculiar instance of unconscious, but grim, humor was afforded at Gallegher's execution. Just as he was led to the box and ordered to climb up, he drew a pocket-knife and declared he would kill himself and not be hanged in public. A Vigilante covered him with a six-shooter. "Drop that, Jack," he exclaimed, "or I'll blow your head off." So Gallegher, having the choice of death between shooting, hanging or beheading, chose hanging after all! He was a coward.
Cy Skinner, when on the way to the scaffold, broke and ran, calling on his captors to shoot. They declined, and hanged him. Alex Carter, who was on the fatal line with Skinner in that lot, was disgusted with him for running. He asked for a smoke while the men were waiting, and died with a lie on his lips—"I am innocent." That is not an infrequent declaration of criminals at the last. The lie is only a blind clinging to the last possible means of escape, and is the same as the instinct for self-preservation, a crime swallowed up in guilt.
Johnny Cooper wanted a "good smoke" before he died, and was given it. Bob Zachary died without fear, and praying forgiveness on his executioners. Steve Marshland asked to be pardoned because of his youth. "You should have thought of that before," was the grim reply. He was adjudged old enough to die, as he had been old enough to kill.
George Shears was one of the gamest of the lot. He seemed indifferent about it all after his capture, and, when he was told that he was to be hanged, he remarked that he ought to be glad it was no worse. He was executed in the barn at a ranch where he was caught, and, conveniences being few, a ladder was used instead of a box or other drop. He was told to ascend the latter, and did so without the least hesitation or evidence of concern. "Gentlemen," said he, "I am not used to this business, never having been hung before. Shall I jump off or slide off?" They told him to "jump, of course," and he took this advice. "All right. Good-by!" he said, and sprang off with unconcern.
Whiskey Bill was not given much chance for last words. He was hung from horseback, the noose being dropped down from a tree to his neck as he sat on a horse behind one of theVigilantes. "Good-by, Bill," was the remark of the latter, as he spurred his horse and left Bill hanging.
One of the most singular phenomena of these executions was that of Bill Hunter, who, while hanging by the neck, went through all the motions of drawing and firing his six-shooter six times. Whether the action was conscious or unconscious it is impossible to tell.
Bill Bunton resisted arrest and was pugnacious, of course declaring his innocence. At the last he showed great gameness. He was particular about the manner in which the knot of the rope was adjusted to his neck, seeming, as did many of these men, to dread any suffering while hanging. He asked if he might jump off the platform himself, and was told he might if he liked. "I care no more for hanging," he explained, "than I do for taking a drink of water, but I'd like to have my neck broken. I'd like to have a mountain three hundred feet high to jump off from. Now, I'll give you the time: One—two—three. Here goes!"
Joseph A. Slade—A Man with a Newspaper Reputation—Bad, but Not as Bad as Painted—Hero of the Overland Express Route—A Product of Courage Plus Whiskey, and the End of the Product.
One of the best-known desperadoes the West ever produced was Joseph A. Slade, agent of the Overland stage line on the central or mountain division, about 1860, and hence in charge of large responsibilities in a strip of country more than six hundred miles in extent, which possessed all the ingredients for trouble in plenty. Slade lived, in the heyday of his career, just about the time when men from the East were beginning to write about the newly discovered life of the West. Bret Harte had left his indelible stamp upon the literature of the land, and Mark Twain was soon to spread widely his impressions of life as seen in "Roughing It"; whilecountless newspaper men and book writers were edging out and getting hearsay stories of things known at first hand by a very few careful and conscientious writers.
The hearsay man engaged in discovering the West always clung to the regular lines of travel; and almost every one who passed across the mountains on the Overland stage line would hear stories about the desperate character of Slade. These stories grew by newspaper multiplication, until at length the man was owner of the reputation of a fiend, a ghoul, and a murderer. There was a wide difference between this and the truth. As a matter of fact, there were many worse desperadoes on the border.
Slade was born at Carlisle, Illinois, and served in the Mexican War in 1848. He appears to have gone into the Overland service in 1859. At once he plunged into the business of the stage line, and soon became a terror to the thieves and outlaws, several of whom he was the means of having shot or hung, although he himself was nothing of a man-hunter at the time; and indeed, in all his life he killed but one man—a case of a reputation beyond desert, and an instance of a reputation fostered by admiring but ignorant writers.
Slade was reported to have tied one of his enemies, Jules Reni, more commonly called Jules, to the stake, and to have tortured him for a day, shooting him to pieces bit by bit, and cutting off his ears, one of which he always afterward wore in his pocket as a souvenir. There was little foundation for this reputation beyond the fact that he did kill Jules, and did it after Jules had been captured and disarmed by other men. But he had been threatened time and again by Jules, and was once shot and left for dead by the latter, who emptied a pistol and a shotgun at Slade, and left him lying with thirteen bullets and buckshot in his body. Jules thought he did not need to shoot Slade any more after that, and gave directions for his burial as soon as he should have died. At that Slade rose on his elbow and promised Jules he would live and would wear one of his, Jules', ears on his watch chain; a threat which no doubt gave rise to a certain part of his ghastly reputation. Jules was hung for a while by the stage people, but was let down and released on promise of leaving the country never to return. He did not keep his promise, and it had been better for him if he had.
Jules Reni was a big Frenchman, one of thatsort of early ranchers who were owners of small ranches and a limited number of cattle and horses—just enough to act as a shield for thefts of live stock, and to offer encouragement to such thefts. Before long Jules was back at his old stamping-grounds, where he was looked on as something of a bully; and at once he renewed his threats against Slade.
Slade went to the officers of the military post at Laramie, the only kind of authority then in the land, which had no sort of courts or officers, and asked them what he should do. They told him to have Jules captured and then to kill him, else Jules would do the same for him. Slade sent four men out to the ranch where Jules was stopping, about twelve miles from Laramie, while he followed in the stage-coach. These men captured Jules at a ranch a little farther down the line, and left him prisoner at the stage station. Here Slade found him in the corral, a prisoner, unarmed and at his mercy, and without hesitation he shot him, the ball striking him in the mouth. His victim fell and feigned death, but Slade—who was always described as a good pistol shot—saw that he was not killed, and told him he should have time to make his will if he desired. There is color in the chargeof deliberate cruelty, but perhaps rude warrant for the cruelty, under the circumstances of treachery in which Jules had pursued Slade. At least, some time elapsed while a man was running back and forward from the house to the corral with pen and ink and paper. Jules never signed his will. When the last penful of ink came out to the corral, Jules was dead, shot through the head by Slade. This looks like cruelty of an unnecessary sort, and like taunting a helpless victim; but here the warrant for all the Slade sort of stories seems to end, and there is no evidence of his mutilating his victim, as was often described.
Slade went back to the officers of Fort Laramie, and they said he had done right and did not detain him. Nor did any of Jules' friends ever molest him. He returned to his work on the Overland. After this he grew more turbulent, and was guilty of high-handed outrages and of a general disposition to run things wherever he went. The officers at Fort Halleck arrested him and refused to turn him over to the stage line unless the latter agreed to discharge him. This was done, and now Slade, out of work, began to be bad at heart. He took to drink and drifting, and so at last turnedup at the Beaverhead diggings in 1863, not much different from many others of the bad folk to be found there.
Quiet enough when sober, Slade was a maniac in drink, and this latter became his habitual condition. Now and again he sobered up, and he always was a business man and animated by an ambition to get on in the world. He worked here and there in different capacities, and at last settled on a ranch a dozen miles or so from Virginia City, where he lived with his wife, a robust, fine-looking woman of great courage and very considerable beauty, of whom he was passionately fond; although she lived almost alone in the remote cabin in the mountains, while Slade pursued his avocations, such as they were, in the settlements along Alder Gulch.
Slade now began to grow ugly and hard, and to exult in terrorizing the hard men of those hard towns. He would strike a man in the face while drinking with him, would rob his friends while playing cards, would ride into the saloons and break up the furniture, and destroy property with seeming exultation at his own maliciousness. He was often arrested, warned, and fined; and sometimes he defied such officers as went after him and refused to be arrested. Hiswhole conduct made him a menace to the peace of this little community, which was now endeavoring to become more decent, and he fell under the fatal scrutiny of the Vigilantes, who concluded that the best thing to do was to hang Slade. He had never killed anyone as yet, although he had abused many; but it was sure that he would kill some one if allowed to run on; and, moreover, it was humiliating to have one man trying to run the town and doing as he pleased. Slade was to learn what society means, and what the social compact means, as did many of these wild men who had been running as savages outside of and independent of the law. Slade got wind of the deliberations of the Committee, as well he might when six hundred men came down from Nevada Camp to Virginia City to help in the court of the miners, before which Slade was now to come. It was the Nevada Vigilantes who were most strongly of the belief that death and not banishment was the proper punishment for Slade. The leader of the marching men calmly told Slade that the Committee had decided to hang him; and, once the news was sure, Slade broke out into lamentations.
This was often the case with men who hadbeen bullies and terrors. They weakened when in the hands of a stronger power. Slade crept about on his hands and knees, begging like a baby. "My God! My God!" he cried. "Must I die? Oh, my poor wife, my poor wife! My God, men, you can't mean that I'm to die!"
They did mean it, and neither his importunities nor those of his friends had avail. His life had been too rough and violent and was too full of menace to others. He had had his fair frontier chance and had misused it. Some wept at his prayers, but none relented. In broad daylight, the procession moved down the street, and soon Slade was swinging from the beam of a corral gate, one more example of the truth that when man belongs to society he owes duty to society and else must suffer at its hands. This was the law.
Slade's wife was sent for and reached town soon after Slade's body was cut down and laid out. She loaded the Vigilantes with imprecations, and showed the most heartbroken grief. The two had been very deeply attached. She was especially regretful that Slade had been hanged and not shot. He was worth a better death than that, she protested.
Slade's body was preserved in alcohol and kept out at the lone ranch cabin all that winter. In the spring it was sent down to Salt Lake City and buried there. As that was a prominent point on the overland trail, the tourists did the rest. The saga of Slade as a bad man was widely disseminated.
The Desperado of the Plains—Lawlessness Founded on Loose Methods—The Rustlers of the Cow Country—Excuses for Their Acts—The Approach of the Commercial West.
One pronounced feature of early Western life will have been remarked in the story of the mountain settlements with which we have been concerned, and that is the transient and migratory character of the population. It is astonishing what distances were traveled by the bold men who followed the mining stampedes all over the wilderness of the upper Rockies, in spite of the unspeakable hardships of a region where travel at its best was rude, and travel at its worst well-nigh an impossibility. The West was first peopled by wanderers, nomads, even in its mountain regions, which usually attach their population tothemselves and cut off the disposition to roam. This nomad nature of the adventurers made law almost an impossible thing. A town was organized and then abandoned, on the spur of necessity or rumor. Property was unstable, taxes impossible, and any corps of executive officers difficult of maintenance. Before there can be law there must be an attached population.
The lawlessness of the real West was therefore much a matter of conditions after all, rather than of morals. It proved above all things that human nature is very much akin, and that good men may go wrong when sufficiently tempted by great wealth left unguarded. The first and second decades after the close of the civil war found the great placers of the Rockies and Sierras exhausted, and quartz mines taking their place. The same period, as has been shown, marked the advent of the great cattle herds from the South upon the upper ranges of the territories beyond the Missouri river. By this time, the plains began to call to the adventurers as the mines recently had called.
Here, then, was wealth, loose, unattached, apparently almost unowned, nomad wealth, and waiting for a nomad population to shareit in one way or another. Once more, the home was lacking, the permanent abode; wherefore, once more the law was also lacking, and man ruled himself after the ancient savage ways. By this time frontiersmen were well armed with repeating weapons, which now used fixed ammunition. There appeared on the plains more and better armed men than were ever known, unorganized, in any land at any period of the earth's history; and the plains took up what the mountains had begun in wild and desperate deeds.
The only property on the arid plains at that time was that of live stock. Agriculture had not come, and it was supposed could never come. The vast herds of cattle from the lower ranges, Texas and Mexico, pushed north to meet the railroads, now springing westward across the plains; but a large proportion of these cattle were used as breeding stock to furnish the upper cow range with horned population. Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, western Nebraska, the Dakotas, discovered that they could raise range cattle as well as the southern ranges, and fatten them far better; so presently thousands upon thousands of cattle were turned loose, without a fence in those thousands ofmiles, to exist as best they might, and guarded as best might be by a class of men as nomadic as their herds. These cattle were cheap at that time, and they made a general source of food supply much appreciated in a land but just depopulated of its buffalo. For a long time it was but a venial crime to kill a cow and eat it if one were hungry. A man's horse was sacred, but his cow was not, because there were so many cows, and they were shifting and changing about so much at best.
The ownership of these herds was widely scattered and difficult to trace. A man might live in Texas and have herds in Montana, andvice versa. His property right was known only by the brand upon the animal, his being but the tenure of a sign.
"The respect for this sign was the whole creed of the cattle trade. Without a fence, without an atom of actual control, the cattle man held his property absolutely. It mingled with the property of others, but it was never confused therewith. It wandered a hundred miles from him, and he knew not where it was, but it was surely his and sure to find him. To touch it was crime. To appropriate it meant punishment. Common necessity made commoncustom, common custom made common law, and common law made statutory law."[E]
The oldfierroor iron mark of the Spanish cattle owner, and hisventaor sale-brand to another had become common law all over the Southwest when the Anglo-Saxon first struck that region. The Saxon accepted these customs as wise and rational, and soon they were the American law all over the American plains.
The great bands of cattle ran almost free in the Southwest for many years, each carrying the brand of the owner, if the latter had ever seen it or cared to brand it. Many cattle roamed free without any brand whatever, and no one could tell who owned them. When the northern ranges opened, this question of unbranded cattle still remained, and the "maverick" industry was still held matter of sanction, there seeming to be enough for all, and the day being one of glorious freedom and plenty, the baronial day of the great and once unexhausted West.
Now theventa, or brand indicating the sale of an animal to another owner, began to complicate matters to a certain extent. A purchasercould put his ownfierrobrand on a cow, and that meant that he now owned it. But then some suspicious soul asked, "How shall we know whence such and such cows came, and how tell whether or not this man did not steal them outright from his neighbor's herd and put his own brand on them?" Here was the origin of the bill of sale, and also of the counter brand or "vent brand," as it is known upon the upper ranges. The owner duplicated his recorded brand upon another recorded part of the animal, and this meant his deed of conveyance, when taken together with the bill of sale over his commercial signature. Of course, several conveyances would leave the hide much scarred and hard to read; and, as there were "road brands" also used to protect the property while in transit from the South to the North or from the range to the market, the reading of the brands and the determination of ownership of the animal might be, and very often was, a nice matter, and one not always settled without argument; and argument in the West often meant bloodshed in those days. Some hard men started up in trade near the old cattle trails, and made a business of disputing brands with the trail drivers. Sometimesthey made good their claims, and sometimes they did not. There were graves almost in line from Texas to Montana.
It is now perfectly easy to see what a wide and fertile field was here offered to men who did not want to observe the law. Here was property to be had without work, and property whose title could easily be called into question; whose ownership was a matter of testimony and record, to be sure, but testimony which could be erased or altered by the same means which once constituted it a record and sign. The brand was made with an iron, and it could be changed with an iron. A large and profitable industry arose in changing these brands. The rustler, brand-burner or brand-blotcher now became one of the new Western characters, and a new sort of bad-manism had its birth.
"It is very easy to see how temptation was offered to the cow thief and 'brand blotter.' Here were all these wild cattle running loose over the country. The imprint of a hot iron on a hide made the creature the property of the brander, provided no one else had branded it before. The time of priority was matter of proof. With the handy "running-iron" or straight rod, which was always attached to hissaddle when he rode out, could not the cow thief erase a former brand and put over it one of his own? Could he not, for instance, change a U into an O, or a V into a diamond, or a half-circle into a circle? Could he not, moreover, kill and skin an animal and sell the beef as his own? Between him and the owner was only this little mark. Between him and changing this mark was nothing but his moral principles. The range was very wide. Hardly a figure would show on that unwinking horizon all day long. And what was a heifer here and there?"
Such was the temptation and opportunity which led many a man to step over the line between right and wrong. Their excuse lies in the fact that the line was newly drawn and that it was often vague and inexact. It was easy, from killing or rebranding an occasional cow, to see the profits of larger operation. The faithful cowboys who cared for these herds and protected them even with their lives in the interest of absent owners began in time to tire of working on a salary, and settled down into little ranches of their own, starting with a herd of cattle lawfully purchased and branded. An occasional maverick came across their rangeand they branded it. A brand was faint and not legible, and they put their own iron over it. They learned that pyrography with a hot poker was very profitable. The rest was easy. The first step was the one that counted; but who could tell where that first step was taken?
At any rate, cattle owners began to take notice of their cows as the prices went up, and they had laws made to protect property rapidly enhancing in value. Cow owners were required to have fixed or stencil-irons, and were forbidden to trace a pattern with a straight iron or "running-iron." Each ranch must have its own iron or stencil. Texas as early as the '60's and '70's passed laws forbidding the use of the running-iron altogether, so that after that it was not safe to be caught riding the range with a straight iron under the saddle flap. Any man so discovered had to do some quick explaining.
The next step after this was the organization of the cattle associations in the several territories and states which made the home of the cattle trade. These associations banded together in a national association. Detectives were placed at the stockyards in Chicago and Kansas City, charged with the finding of cattlestolen on the range and shipped with or without clean brands. In short, there had now grown up an armed and legal warfare between the cow men themselves—in the first place very large-handed thieves—and the rustlers and "little fellows" who were accused of being too liberal with their brand blotching. The prosecution of these men was undertaken with something of the old vigor that characterized the pursuit of horse thieves, with this difference, that, whereas all the world had hated a horse thief as a common enemy, very much of the world found excuse for the so-called rustler, who was known to be doing only what his accusers had done before him.
There may be a certain interest attaching to the methods of the range riders of this day, and those who care to go into the history of the cattle trade in its early days are referred to the work earlier quoted, where the matter is more fully covered.[F]Brief reference will suffice here.
The rustler might brand with his own straight running-iron, as it were, writing over again the brand he wished to change; but this was clumsy and apt to be detected, forthe new wound would slough and look suspicious. A piece of red-hot hay wire or telegraph wire was a better tool, for this could be twisted into the shape of almost any registered brand, and it would so cunningly connect the edges of both that the whole mark would seem to be one scar of the same date. The fresh burn fitted in with the older one so that it was impossible to swear that it was not a part of the first brand mark. Yet another way of softening a fresh and fraudulent brand was to brand through a wet blanket with a heavy iron, which thus left a wound deep enough, but not apt to slough, and so betray a brand done long after the round-up, and hence subject to scrutiny.
As to the ways in which brands were altered in their lines, these were many and most ingenious. A sample page will be sufficient to show the possibilities of the art by which the rustler set over to his own herds on the free range the cows of his far-away neighbor, whom, perhaps, he did not love as himself. The list on the opposite page is taken from "The Story of the Cowboy."
HOW THE RUSTLER WORKED The above plate illustrates the manner in which cow-brands were changed. The original brand appears in each case to the left, and the various alterations follow. It will be noted that with every change there is something added—the rule always adopted by the swindlerHOW THE RUSTLER WORKED
The above plate illustrates the manner in which cow-brands were changed. The original brand appears in each case to the left, and the various alterations follow. It will be noted that withevery change there is something added—the rule always adopted by the swindler
Such, then, was the burglar of the range, the rustler, to whom most of the mysterious anduntraceable crimes were ascribed. Such also were the excuses to be offered for some of the men who did what to them did not seem wrong acts. The sudden hostility of the newly-come cow men embittered and inflamed them, and from this it was easy and natural to the arbitrament of arms.
The bad man of the plains dates to this era, and his acts may be attributed to these causes. There were to be found among these men many refugees and outlaws, as well as many better men gone wrong through point of view. Fierce and far were the battles between the rustlers and the cow barons. Commerce had its way at last. The lawless man had to go, and he had to go even before the law had come.
The Vigilantes of the cattle range, organizing first in Montana and working southward, made a clean sweep in their work. In one campaign they killed somewhere between sixty and eighty men accused of cattle rustling. They hung thirteen men on one railroad bridge one morning in northwestern Nebraska. The statement is believed to be correct that, in the ten years from 1876 to 1886, they executed more men without process of law than have been executed under the law in all the United Statessince then. These lynchings also were against the law. In short, it may perhaps begin to appear to those who study into the history of our earlier civilization that the term "law" is a very wide and lax and relative one, and one extremely difficult of exact application.
Wild Bill Hickok—The Beau Ideal of the Western Bad Man; Chivalric, Daring, Generous, and Game—A Type of the Early Western Frontier Officer.
As has been shown in preceding chapters, the Western plains were passed over and left unsettled until the advent of the railroads, which began to cross the plains coincident with the arrival of the great cattle herds which came up from the South after a market. This market did not wait for the completion of the railroads, but met the railroads more than half way; indeed, followed them quite across the plains. The frontier sheriff now came upon the Western stage as he had never done before. The bad man also sprang into sudden popular recognition, the more so because he was now accessible to view and within reach of the tourist and tenderfoot investigatorof the Western fauna. These were palmy days for the wild West.
Unless it be a placer camp in the mountains, there is no harder collection of human beings to be found than that which gathers in tents and shanties at a temporary railway terminus of the frontier. Yet such were all the capitals of civilization in the earliest days. One town was like another. The history of Wichita and Newton and Fort Dodge was the history of Abilene and Ellsworth and Hays City and all the towns at the head of the advancing rails. The bad men and women of one moved on to the next, just as they did in the stampedes of placer days.
To recount the history of one after another of these wild towns would be endless and perhaps wearisome. But this history has one peculiar feature not yet noted in our investigations. All these cow camps meant to be real towns some day. They meant to take the social compact. There came to each of these camps men bent upon making homes, and these men began to establish a law and order spirit and to set up a government. Indeed, the regular system of American government was there as soon as the railroad was there, and this lawwas strong on its legislative and executive sides. The frontier sheriff or town marshal was there, the man for the place, as bold and hardy as the bold and hardy men he was to meet and subdue, as skilled with weapons, as willing to die; and upheld, moreover, with that sense of duty and of moral courage which is granted even to the most courageous of men when he feels that he has the sentiment of the majority of good people at his back.
To describe the life of one Western town marshal, himself the best and most picturesque of them all, is to cover all this field sufficiently. There is but one man who can thus be chosen, and that is Wild Bill Hickok, better known for a generation as "Wild Bill," and properly accorded an honorable place in American history.
The real name of Wild Bill was James Butler Hickok, and he was born in May, 1837, in La Salle county, Illinois. This brought his youth into the days of Western exploration and conquest, and the boy read of Carson and Frémont, then popular idols, with the result that he proposed a life of adventure for himself. He was eighteen years of age when he first saw the West as a fighting man under Jim Lane, of Free Soil fame, in the guerrilla daysof Kansas before the civil war. He made his mark, and was elected a constable in that dangerous country before he was twenty years of age. He was then a tall, "gangling" youth, six feet one in height, with yellow hair and blue eyes. He later developed into as splendid looking a man as ever trod on leather, muscular and agile as he was powerful and enduring. His features were clean-cut and expressive, his carriage erect and dignified, and no one ever looked less the conventional part of the bad man assigned in popular imagination. He was not a quarrelsome man, although a dangerous one, and his voice was low and even, showing a nervous system like that of Daniel Boone—"not agitated." It might have been supposed that he would be a natural master of weapons, and such was the case. The use of rifle and revolver was born in him, and perhaps no man of the frontier ever surpassed him in quick and accurate use of the heavy six-shooter. The religion of the frontier was not to miss, and rarely ever did he shoot except he knew that he would not miss. The tale of his killings in single combat is the longest authentically assigned to any man in American history.
After many experiences with the pro-slaveryfolk from the border, Bill, or "Shanghai Bill," as he was then known—a nickname which clung for years—went stage driving for the Overland, and incidentally did some effective Indian fighting for his employers, finally, in the year 1861, settling down as station agent for the Overland at Rock Creek station, about fifty miles west of Topeka. He was really there as guard for the horse band, for all that region was full of horse thieves and cutthroats, and robberies and killings were common enough. It was here that there occurred his greatest fight, the greatest fight of one man against odds at close range that is mentioned in any history of any part of the world. There was never a battle like it known, nor is the West apt again to produce one matching it.
The borderland of Kansas was at that time, as may be remembered, ground debated by the anti-slavery and pro-slavery factions, who still waged bitter war against one another, killing, burning, and pillaging without mercy. The civil war was then raging, and Confederates from Missouri were frequent visitors in eastern Kansas under one pretext or another, of which horse lifting was the one most common, it being held legitimate to prey upon the enemyas opportunity offered. Two border outlaws by the name of the McCandlas boys led a gang of hard men in enterprises of this nature, and these intended to run off the stage company's horses when they found they could not seduce Bill to join their number. He told them to come and take the horses if they could; and on the afternoon of December 16, 1861, ten of them, led by the McCandlas brothers, rode up to his dugout to do so. Bill was alone, his stableman being away hunting. He retreated to the dark interior of his dugout and got ready his weapons, a rifle, two six-shooters, and a knife.
The assailants proceeded to batter in the door with a log, and as it fell in, Jim McCandlas, who must have been a brave man to undertake so foolhardy a thing against a man already known as a killer, sprang in at the opening. He, of course, was killed at once. This exhausted the rifle, and Bill picked up the six-shooters from the table and in three quick shots killed three more of the gang as they rushed in at the door. Four men were dead in less than that many seconds; but there were still six others left, all inside the dugout now, and all firing at him at a range of three feet. It was almost a miracle that, under such surroundings,the man was not killed. Bill now was crowded too much to use his firearms, and took to the bowie, thrusting at one man and another as best he might. It is known among knife-fighters that a man will stand up under a lot of flesh-cutting and blood-letting until the blade strikes a bone. Then he seems to drop quickly if it be a deep and severe thrust. In this chance medley, the knife wounds inflicted on each other by Bill and his swarming foes did not at first drop their men; so that it must have been several minutes that all seven of them were mixed in a mass of shooting, thrusting, panting, and gasping humanity. Then Jack McCandlas swung his rifle barrel and struck Bill over the head, springing upon him with his knife as well. Bill got his hand on a six-shooter and killed him just as he would have struck. After that no one knows what happened, not even Bill himself, who got his name then and there. "I just got sort of wild," he said, describing it. "I thought my heart was on fire. I went out to the pump then to get a drink, and I was all cut and shot to pieces."
From a painting by John W. Norton WILD BILL HICKOK'S DESPERATE FIGHT IN THE DUGOUT—ONE MAN AGAINST TENFrom a painting by John W. NortonWILD BILL HICKOK'S DESPERATE FIGHT IN THE DUGOUT—ONE MAN AGAINST TEN
They called him Wild Bill after that, and he had earned the name. There were six dead men on the floor of the dugout. He had fairlywhipped the ten of them, and the four remaining had enough and fled from that awful hole in the ground. Two of these were badly wounded. Bill followed them to the door. His own weapons were exhausted or not at hand by this time, but his stableman came up just then with a rifle in his hands. Bill caught it from him, and, cut up as he was, fired and killed one of the wounded desperadoes as he tried to mount his horse. The other wounded man later died of his wounds. Eight men were killed by the one. The two who got to their horses and escaped were perhaps never in the dugout at all, for it was hardly large enough to hold another man had any wanted to get in.
There is no record of any fighting man to equal this. It took Bill a year to recover from his wounds. The life of the open air and hard work brought many Western men through injuries which would be fatal in the States. The pure air of the plains had much to do with this. Bill now took service as wagon-master under General Frémont and managed to get attacked by a force of Confederates while on his way to Sedalia, the war being now in full swing. He fled and was pursued; but, shooting back with six-shooters, killed fourmen. It will be seen that he had now in single fight killed twelve men, and he was very young. This tally did not cover Indians, of whom he had slain several. Although he did not enlist, he went into the army as an independent sharpshooter, just because the fighting was good, and his work at this was very deadly. In four hours at the Pea Ridge battle, where he lay behind a log, on a hill commanding the flat where the Confederates were formed, he is said to have killed thirty-five men, one of them the Confederate General McCullough. It was like shooting buffalo for him. He was charged by a company of the enemy, but was rescued by his own men.
Not yet enlisting, Bill went in as a spy for General Curtis, and took the dangerous work of going into "Pap" Price's lines, among the touch-and-go Missourians and Arkansans, in search of information useful to the Union forces. Bill enlisted for business purposes in a company of Price's mounted rangers, got the knowledge desired, and fled, killing a Confederate sergeant by name of Lawson in his escape. Curtis sent him back again, this time into the forces of Kirby Smith, then in Texas, but reported soon to move up into Arkansas. Billenlisted again, and again showed his skill in the saddle, killing two men as he fled. Count up all his known victims to this time, and the tally would be at least sixty-two men; and Bill was then but twenty-five.
A third time Curtis sent Bill back into the Confederate lines, this time into another part of Price's army. Here he was detected and arrested as a spy. Bound hand and foot in his death watch, he killed his captor after he had torn his hands free, and once more escaped. After that, he dared not go back again, for he was too well known and too difficult to disguise. He could not keep out of the fighting, however, and went as a scout and free lance with General Davis, during Price's second invasion of Missouri. He was not an enlisted man, and seems to have done pretty much as he liked. One day he rode out on his own hook, and was stopped by three men, who ordered him to halt and dismount. All three men had their hands on their revolvers; but, to show the difference between average men and a specialist, Bill killed two of them and fatally shot the other before they could get into action. His tally was now sixty-six men at least.
Curtis now sent Bill out into Kansas to lookinto a report that some Indians were about to join the Confederate forces. Bill got the news, and also engaged in a knife duel with the Sioux, Conquering Bear, whom he accused of trying to ambush him. It was a fair and desperate fight, with knives, and although Bill finally killed his man, he himself was so badly cut up that he came near dying, his arm being ripped from shoulder to elbow, a wound which it took years to mend. It is doubtful if any man ever survived such injuries as he did, for by this time he was a mass of scars from pistol and knife wounds. He had probably been in danger of his life more than a hundred times in personal difficulties; for the man with a reputation as a bad man has a reputation which needs continual defending.
After the war, Bill lived from hand to mouth, like most frontier dwellers. It was at Springfield, Missouri, that another duel of his long list occurred, in which he killed Dave Tutt, a fine pistol shot and a man with social ambitions in badness. It was a fair fight in the town square by appointment. Bill killed his man and wheeled so quickly on Tutt's followers that Tutt had not had time to fall before Bill's six-shooter was turned the opposite way, and hewas asking Tutt's friends if they wanted any of it themselves. They did not. This fight was forced on Bill, and his quiet attempts to avoid it and his stern way of accepting it, when inevitable, won him high estimation on the border. Indeed, he was now known all over the country, and his like has not since been seen. He was still a splendid looking man, and as cool and quiet and modest as ever he had been.
Bill now went to trapping in the less settled parts of Nebraska, and for a while he lived in peace, until he fell into a saloon row over some trivial matter and invited four of his opponents outside to fight him with pistols; the four were to fire at the word, and Bill to do the same—his pistol against their four. In this fight he killed one man at first fire, but he himself was shot through the shoulder and disabled in his right arm. He killed two more with his left hand and badly wounded the other. This was a fair fight also, and the only wonder is he was not killed; but he seemed never to consider odds, and literally he knew nothing but fight.
His score was now seventy-two men, not counting Indians. He himself never reported how many Indians he and Buffalo Bill killed as scouts in the Black Kettle campaign underCarr and Primrose, but the killing of Black Kettle himself was sometimes attributed to Wild Bill. The latter was badly wounded in the thigh with a lance, and it took a long time for this wound to heal. To give this hurt and others better opportunity for mending, Bill now took a trip back East to his home in Illinois. While East he found that he had a reputation, and he undertook to use it. He found no way of making a living, however, and he returned to the West, where he could better market his qualifications.
At that time Hays City, Kansas, was one of the hardest towns on the frontier. It had more than a hundred gambling dives and saloons to its two thousand population, and murder was an ordinary thing. Hays needed a town marshal, and one who could shoot. Wild Bill was unanimously selected, and in six weeks he was obliged to kill Jack Strawhan for trying to shoot him. This he did by reason of his superior quickness with the six-shooter, for Strawhan was drawing first. Another bad man, Mulvey, started to run Hays, in whose peace and dignity Bill now felt a personal ownership. Covered by Mulvey's two revolvers, Bill found room for the lightning flash of time, which is all that isneeded by the real revolver genius, and killed Mulvey on the spot. His tally was now seventy-five men. He made it seventy-eight in a fight with a bunch of private soldiers, who called him a "long-hair"—a term very accurate, by the way, for Bill was proud of his long, blond hair, as was General Custer and many another man of the West at that time. In this fight, Bill was struck by seven pistol balls and barely escaped alive by flight to a ranch on the prairie near by. He lay there three weeks, while General Phil Sheridan had details out with orders to get him dead or alive. He later escaped in a box-car to another town, and his days as marshal of Hays were over.
Bill now tried his hand at Wild West theatricals, seeing that already many Easterners were "daffy," as he called it, about the West; but he failed at this, and went back once more to the plains where he belonged. He was chosen marshal of Abilene, then the cow camp par excellence of the middle plains, and as tough a community as Hays had been.
The wild men from the lower plains, fighting men, mad from whiskey and contact with the settlements' possibilities of long-denied indulgence, swarmed in the streets and dives,mingling with desperadoes and toughs from all parts of the frontier. Those who have never lived in such a community will never be able by any description to understand its phenomena. It seems almost unbelievable that sober, steady-going America ever knew such days; but there they were, and not so long ago, for this was only 1870.
Two days after Bill was elected marshal of Abilene, he killed a desperado who was "whooping-up" the town in customary fashion. That same night, he was on the street, in a dim light, when all at once he saw a man whisk around a corner, and saw something shine, as he thought, with the gleam of a weapon. As showing how quick were the hand and eye of the typical gun-man of the day, it may be stated that Bill killed this man in a flash, only to find later that it was a friend, and one of his own deputies. The man was only pulling a handkerchief from his pocket. Bill knew that he was watched every moment by men who wanted to kill him. He had his life in his hands all the time. For instance, he had next to kill the friend of the desperado whom he had shot. By this time, Abilene respected its new marshal; indeed, was rather proud of him. The reignof the bad man of the plains was at its height, and the professional man-killer, the specialist with firearms, was a figure here and there over wide regions. Among all these none compared with this unique specimen. He was generous, too, as he was deadly, for even yet he was supporting a McCandlas widow, and he always furnished funerals for his corpses. He had one more to furnish soon. Enemies down the range among the cow men made up a purse of five thousand dollars, and hired eight men to kill the town marshal and bring his heart back South. Bill heard of it, and literally made all of them jump off the railroad train where he met them. One was killed in the jump. His list of homicides was now eighty-one. He had never yet been arrested for murder, and his killing was in fair open fight, his life usually against large odds. He was a strange favorite of fortune, who seemed certainly to shield him round-about.
Bill now went East for another try at theatricals, in which, happily, he was unsuccessful, and for which he felt a strong distaste. He was scared—on the stage; and when he saw what was expected of him he quit and went back once more to the West. He appeared at Cheyenne,in the Black Hills, wandering thus from one point to another after the fashion of the frontier, where a man did many things and in many places. He had a little brush with a band of Indians, and killed four of them with four shots from his six-shooter, bringing his list in red and white to eighty-five men. He got away alive from the Black Hills with difficulty; but in 1876 he was back again at Deadwood, married now, and, one would have thought, ready to settle down.
But the life of turbulence ends in turbulence. He who lives by the sword dies by the sword. Deadwood was as bad a place as any that could be found in the mining regions, and Bill was not an officer here, as he had been in Kansas towns. As marshal of Hays and Abilene and United States marshal later at Hays City, he had been a national character. He was at Deadwood for the time only plain Wild Bill, handsome, quiet, but ready for anything.
Ready for anything but treachery! He himself had always fought fair and in the open. His men were shot in front. Not such was to be his fate. On the day of August 2, 1876, while he was sitting at a game of cards in a saloon, a hard citizen by name of Jack McCallslipped up behind him, placed a pistol to the back of his head, and shot him dead before he knew he had an enemy near. The ball passed through Bill's head and out at the cheek, lodging in the arm of a man across the table.
Bill had won a little money from McCall earlier in the day, and won it fairly, but the latter had a grudge, and was no doubt one of those disgruntled souls who "had it in" for all the rest of the world. He got away with the killing at the time, for a miners' court let him go. A few days later, he began to boast about his act, seeing what fame was his for ending so famous a life; but at Yankton they arrested him, tried him before a real court, convicted him, and hanged him promptly.
Wild Bill's body was buried at Deadwood, and his grave, surrounded by a neat railing and marked by a monument, long remained one of the features of Deadwood. The monument and fence were disfigured by vandals who sought some memento of the greatest bad man ever in all likelihood seen upon the earth. His tally of eighty-five men seems large, but in fair probability it is not large enough. His main encounters are known historically. He killed a great many Indians at different times, but ofthese no accurate estimate can be claimed. Nor is his list of victims as a sharpshooter in the army legitimately to be added to his record. Cutting out all doubtful instances, however, there remains no doubt that he killed between twenty and thirty men in personal combat in the open, and that never once was he tried in any court on a charge even of manslaughter.
This record is not approached by that of any other known bad man. Many of them are credited with twenty men, a dozen men, and so forth; but when the records are sifted the list dwindles. It is doubted whether any other bad man in America ever actually killed twenty men in fair personal combat. Bill was not killed in fair fight, nor could McCall have hurt him had Bill suspected his intent.
Hickok was about thirty-nine years old when killed, and he had averaged a little more than two men for each year of his entire life. He was well-known among army officers, and esteemed as a scout and a man, never regarded as a tough in any sense. He was a man of singular personal beauty. Of him General Custer, soon thereafter to fall a victim himself upon the plains, said: "He was a plainsman in every sense of the word, yet unlike any otherof his class. Whether on foot or on horseback, he was one of the most perfect types of physical manhood I ever saw. His manner was entirely free from all bluster and bravado. He never spoke of himself unless requested to do so. His influence among the frontiersmen was unbounded; his word was law. Wild Bill was anything but a quarrelsome man, yet none but himself could enumerate the many conflicts in which he had been engaged."
These are the words of one fighting man about another, and both men are entitled to good rank in the annals of the West. The praise of an army general for a man of no rank or wealth leaves us feeling that, after all, it was a possible thing for a bad man to be a good man, and worthy of respect and admiration, utterly unmingled with maudlin sentiment or weak love for the melodramatic.
Frontier Wars—Armed Conflicts of Bodies of Men on the Frontiers—Political Wars; Town Site Wars; Cattle Wars—Factional Fights.
The history of the border wars on the American frontier, where the fighting was more like battle than murder, and where the extent of the crimes against law became too large for the law ever to undertake any settlement, would make a long series of bloody volumes. These wars of the frontier were sometimes political, as the Kansas anti-slavery warfare; or, again, they were fights over town sites, one armed band against another, and both against the law. Wars over cows, as of the cattle men against the rustlers and "little fellows," often took on the phase of large armed bodies of men meeting in bloody encounter; though the bloodiest of these wars are those least known, and theopera bouffewars those most widely advertised.
The state of Kansas, now so calm and peaceful, is difficult to picture as the scene of a general bloodshed; yet wherever you scratch Kansas history you find a fight. No territory of equal size has had so much war over so many different causes. Her story in Indian fighting, gambler fighting, outlaw fighting, town site fighting, and political fighting is one not approached by any other portion of the West; and if at times it was marked with fanaticism or with sordidness, it was none the less bitter and notable.
The border wars of Kansas and Missouri at the time immediately preceding the civil war would be famed in song and story, had not the greater conflict between North and South wiped all that out of memory. Even the North was divided over the great question of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Alabama, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia gave a whole or a majority vote for this repeal of the Compromise. Against the repeal were Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania,Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin. Illinois and New Jersey voted a tie vote. Ohio cast four votes for the repeal measure, seventeen against it.
This vote brought the territories of Kansas and Nebraska into the Union with the option open on whether or not they should have slavery: "it being the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate slavery into any territory, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their own domestic institutions in their own way."
That was very well; but who were "the people" of these debated grounds? Hundreds of abolitionists of the North thought it their duty to flock to Kansas and take up arms. Hundreds of the inhabitants of Missouri thought it incumbent upon them to run across the line and vote in Kansas on the "domestic institutions"; and to shoot in Kansas and to burn and ravage in Kansas. They were met by the anti-slavery legions along the wide frontier, and brother slew brother for years, one series of more or less ignoble and dastardly outrages following another in big or little, murders and arson in big or little, until the whole country at last wasdrawn into this matter of the domestic institutions of "bleeding Kansas." The animosities formed in those days were bitter and enduring ones, and the more prominent figures on both sides were men marked for later slaughter. The civil war and the slavery question were fought out all over the West for ten years, even twenty years after the war was over. Some large figures came up out of this internecine strife, and there were many deeds of courage and many romantic adventures; but on the whole, although the result of all this was for the best, and added another state to the list unalterably opposed to human slavery, the story in detail is not a pleasant one, and adds no great glory to either side. It is a chapter of American history which is very well let alone.
When the railroads came across the Western plains, they brought a man who has been present on the American frontier ever since the revolutionary war,—the land boomer. He was in Kentucky in time to rob poor old Daniel Boone of all the lands he thought he owned. He founded Marietta, on the Ohio river, on a land steal; and thence, westward, laid out one town after another. The early settler who came down the Ohio valley in the first and seconddecades of the past century passed the ruins of abandoned towns far back to the east even in that day. The town-site shark passed across the Mississippi river and the Missouri, and everywhere his record was the same. He was the pioneer of avarice in very many cases, and often he inaugurated strife where he purported to be establishing law. Each town thought itself the garden spot and center of the universe—one knows not how many Kansas towns, for instance, contended over the absurd honor of being exactly at the center of the United States!—and local pride was such that each citizen must unite with others even in arms, if need be, to uphold the merits of his own "city."
This peculiar phase of frontier nature usually came most into evidence over the questions of county seats. Hardly a frontier county seat was ever established without a fight of some kind, and often a bloody one. It has chanced that the author has been in and around a few of these clashes between rival towns, and he may say that the vehemence of the antagonism of such encounters would have been humorous, had it not been so deadly. Two "cities," composed each of a few frame shanties and a set ofblue-print maps, one just as barren of delight as the other, and neither worth fighting over at the time, do not seem typical of any great moral purpose; yet at times their citizens fought as stubbornly as did the men who fought for and against slavery in Kansas. One instance of this sort of thing will do, and it is covered in the chapter describing the Stevens County War, one of the most desperate and bloody, as well as one of the most recent feuds of local politicians.
For some reason, perhaps that of remoteness of time, the wars of the cow men of the range seem to have had a bolder, a less sordid and more romantic interest, if these terms be allowable. When the cow man began to fence up the free range, to shut up God's out-of-doors, he intrenched upon more than a local or a political pride. He was now infringing upon the great principle of personal freedom. He was throttling the West itself, which had always been a land of freedom. One does not know whether all one's readers have known it, that unspeakable feeling of freedom, of independence, of rebellion at restraint, which came when one could ride or drive for days across the empire of the plains and never meet a fenceto hinder, nor need a road to show the way. To meet one of these new far-flung fences of the rich men who began to take up the West was at that time only to cut it and ride on. The free men of the West would not be fenced in. The range was theirs, so they blindly and lovingly thought. Let those blame them who love this day more than that.
But the fence was the sign of the property-owning man; and the property-owning man has always beaten the nomad and the restless man at last, and set metes and bounds for him to observe. The nesters and rustlers fought out the battle for the free range more fiercely than was ever generally known.
One of the most widely known of these cow wars was the absurd Johnson County War, of Wyoming, which got much newspaper advertising at the time—the summer of 1892—and which was always referred to with a certain contempt among old-timers as the "dude war." Only two men were killed in this war, and the non-resident cattle men who undertook to be ultra-Western and do a little vigilante work for themselves among the rustlers found that they were not fit for the task. They were very glad indeed to get themselves arrestedand under cover, more especially in the protection of the military. They found that they had not lost any rustlers when they stirred up a whole valley full and were themselves besieged, surrounded, and well-nigh ready for a general wiping out. They killed a couple of "little fellows," or, rather, some of their hired Texas cowboys did it for them, but that was all they accomplished, except well-nigh to bankrupt Wyoming in the legal muddle, out of which, of course, nothing came. There were in this party of cattle men a member of the legislature, a member of the stock commission, some two dozen wealthy cattle men, two Harvard graduates, and a young Englishman in search of adventure. They made, on the whole, about the most contemptible and inefficient band of vigilantes that ever went out to regulate things, although their deeds were reported by wire to many journals, and for a time perhaps they felt that they were cutting quite a figure. They had very large property losses to incite them to their action, for the rustlers were then pretty much running things in that part of Wyoming, and the local courts would not convict them. This fiasco scarcely hastened the advent of the day—which came soon enough after the railroads andthe farmers—under which the home dweller outweighed the nomad.[G]
Wars between sheep men and cattle men sometimes took on the phase of armed bodies of men meeting in bloody encounter. The sheep were always unwelcome on the range, and are so to-day, although the courts now adjust such matters better than they formerly did. The cow baron and his men often took revenge upon the woolly nuisances themselves and killed them in numbers. The author knows of one instance where five thousand sheep were killed in one box cañon by irate cow men whose range had been invaded. The sheep eat the grass down to the point of killing it, and cattle will not feed on a country which sheep have crossed. Many wars of this kind have been known all the way from Montana to Mexico.
Again, factional fights might arise over some trivial matter as an immediate cause, in a community or a region where numbers of men fairly equal were separated in self-interest. In a day when life was still wild and free, and when the law was still unknown, these differences of opinion sometimes led to bitter and bloody conflicts between factions.