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The Hangman's Noose

The hangman's noose must be included - along with the ax, the plow, the lariat and the miner's pick - as a symbol of the taming of the West. The hardy frontiersmen had to conquer not only the land and the redskins but also disruptive elements in their own number. They could sleep soundly only after they had rid their ranges of the gunmen, the highwayman, the horse thief and the cattle rustler.

Not all citizens of the frontier complained when law and order proved a little late arriving in their midst. Some, in fact, welcomed the delay. In 1878 an editor in the half-civilized territory of New Mexico looked eastward toward the still less civilized plains of Texas and wrote with frank envy about the kind of law enforcement that Texans practiced. "There are no county officials in Potter County in the Panhandle of Texas," he observed. "Better yet, there are no state officers to interfere with the unalloyed liberty which the inhabitants of that county enjoy. When any horse thieves or bad characters make their appearance they are strung up to the cottonwoods."

Such improvised frontier justice gave way to constituted authority only bit by bit, and sometimes with marked informality. When the early settlers of Cheyenne, Wyoming, were troubled by brigands and bandits, they formed a vigilante force headed by Nathaniel Kimball Boswell, who had come all the way-from New Hampshire to open a drugstore in the territory. With the full blessing of right-thinking elements in the community, Old Boz, as they fondly called him, took it upon himself to arrest rustlers and keep a curb on a population made up for the most part, according to one newspaper, of "gamblers, thieves, highwaymen, ruthless cutthroats and women of the underworld." Boswell's initiative so charmed the governor of the Wyoming Territory, John Campbell, that he decided to appoint him county sheriff. Campbell was undeterred by Wyoming's lack of official forms for such purposes. He simply took a sheet of paper and in his own hand wrote: "Know Ye: That reposing special trust and confidence in the patriotism, integrity and ability of N. K. Boswell, I, John A. Campbell, in pursuance of and by virtue of authority vested in me, do appoint him Sheriff of the county of Albany." At the time - May 1869 - Wyoming had four counties in all, each extending the full length of the territory, north to Montana and south to Colorado and Utah. Thus, by a few strokes of a pen, Nat Boswell became the chief law enforcer of a bailiwick that covered 16,800 square miles.

An equally casual air often attended official arrangements within the frontier towns themselves. When a settlement grew big enough to acquire a town charter, choosing peace officers for the newly incorporated community generally was the first order of business. In at least one case the action was decidedly premature. After Ellsworth, Kansas, got its charter in 1871, the Mayor and council promptly appointed a marshal to enforce the laws. In their haste, the city fathers neglected to adopt laws for the marshal to enforce. A week later they sheepishly reconvened to remedy the oversight.

Even with laws on the books and a duly authorized officer patrolling the streets, keeping order in frontier towns remained at best a shaky proposition. It often depended on the courage and gunslinging skill of a peace officer rather than on any widespread respect for authority. The lawman lived in a world imbued with the frontier psychology of self-reliance - and a world in which firearms were available to everyone. In such a powder-keg situation, the law was best enforced when the man with the badge was skilled with the gun. When he disarmed a group of overexuberant cowboys or separated a pair of quarreling gamblers or held off a howling lynch mob at the door of a jail, the citizenry knew that his six-shooter stood for peace - or else.

In a society where saloonkeepers and owners of gambling halls counted as reputable citizens - and sometimes served as mayors or town councilmen - it was not surprising that gunslingers and gamblers could become peace officers. Sometimes, indeed, they continued their parallel careers. Wild Bill Hickok spent a good part of his term as marshal of Abilene, Kansas, at the poker table. Anyone who sought him on official business had to come to his headquarters at The Alamo, with its huge bar, its array of gaming devices, its orchestra and the oil paintings of nudes on its walls. Like most gunfighters turned lawmen, Hickok saw no reason to abandon his private pursuits while keeping the peace. He held office at the pleasure of the Mayor and city council, and knew he was likely to lose his post when the next mayor named his own man.

Compared with some other town marshals, Wild Bill was a paragon of propriety. Citizens of Laramie, Wyoming, felt impelled to hang their head lawman when it was discovered that in his simultaneous capacity as saloonkeeper he was drugging and robbing his patrons. A number of county sheriffs - who were a cut above town marshals in the peace-keeping hierarchy - met similar ends as a result of their extracurricular activities. Irate vigilantes disposed of the sheriff of Ada County, Idaho, by rope when he was found to be moonlighting as a horse thief.

Such men were exceptions, but the dilemma posed for peaceable citizens of the frontier was widespread. Often the choice they faced when selecting a guardian of law and order lay between an upright but ineffectual fellow townsman and a newcomer of dubious past but iron nerve. Wild Bill Hickok's own bailiwick of Abilene provided a case in point. In 1870, when it ranked as one of the first of the rowdy Kansas cattle towns, the provisional town government named a reluctant grocer as marshal and also proceeded to erect a jail. It was still under construction when a bunch of hell-bent cowboys arrived in town after their long, tedious cattle drive from the plains of Texas. They sized up the new lawman, correctly decided that he was a weak reed, and expressed their sentiments by tearing down his partially built headquarters. Eventually, however, the townsmen managed to complete a jail, and a skylarking chuck-wagon cook was housed in it. The reluctant grocer appeared to have scored his first triumph. But then the prisoner's allies, converging on the scene, shot the lock off the jail door and set their friend free.

Stung by such humiliating displays of official ineptitude, frontier communities that yearned for a firm hand in law enforcement occasionally went to extremes to obtain it. In exchange for a measure of stability, they were sometimes ready to accept even a known badman as marshal, presumably on the theory that such a man was best equipped to deal with his own kind. Few citizens worried about how he had erred in the past, or how he might err in the future. So long as he kept local troublemakers in check, respectable folk could only approve - and fervently hope that his conversion to law and order was a lasting one.

Dime novels to the contrary, the frontier peace officer was seldom the solitary figure he was painted to be, stalking malefactors against superior odds. The Old West had an impressive number and diversity of lawmen, and a basic framework of jurisdictions. Occasional overlaps, as well as rival ambitions and personal feuds, often caused conflicts between men in different jurisdictions - the clash between the Earps of Tombstone and Sheriff Behan of surrounding Cochise County was a notable example - but just as often there was cooperation. And within each jurisdiction the head lawman was as a rule able to call upon various sources of help, both trained and amateur, when things threatened to get seriously out of hand.

At the town level, the marshal-in effect, the chief of police - usually had at his disposal a small force made up of an assistant marshal and a few policemen; in addition, he could call upon ordinary citizens in an emergency to serve as temporary policemen. On the county level, law enforcement rested in the hands of a sheriff, an undersheriff and a group of deputy sheriffs, aided now and then by posses of impromptu deputies.

There was also a third level of lawmen, in the form of a corps of federal officials operating on a state - or district - or territory-wide basis. These United States marshals and their deputies were technically charged with enforcing only federal laws and pursuing such criminals as mail robbers and Army deserters, but the deputies often held additional commissions as town or county lawmen and lent a hand - and a gun - in support of their local counterparts.

In the wildest reaches of the Southwest, where county government was rudimentary or nonexistent, a special breed of lawmen flourished: the rangers or mounted police. Cattle thieves and other miscreants who operated along the Mexican border in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona had particular reason to fear these pursuers, who were direct agents of the state or territorial government. Usually they were recruited from the ranks of the toughest candidates available - men who could not only shoot straight and fast, but also ride hard and long, since they had to patrol great distances on horseback. Rangers in the three states were organized in quasi-military fashion, but they exercised their own judgment as to methods of law enforcement. Once, when Captain Burt Mossman was asked just how he and his rangers meant to go about ridding Arizona of rustlers, he put it this way:

"If they come along easy, everything will be all right. If they don't, well, I just guess we can make pretty short work of them. I know most of them, and the life those fellows are leading in the mesquite shrub to keep out of reach of the law is a dog's life. They ought to thank me for giving them a chance to come in and take their medicine. Some of them will object, of course. They'll probably try a little gunplay as a bluff, but I shoot fairly well myself, and the boys who back me up are handy enough with their guns. Any rustler who wants to yank on the rope and kick up trouble will find he's up against it."

Collectively, the town, county, territorial or state, and federal lawmen made up a sizable hierarchy, with the U.S. marshal at the top of the pecking order. In large part he owed his preeminence to the fact that he alone had the honor of being directly appointed by the President of the United States, with the advice and consent of the Senate. Since party patronage dictated his selection, his talents at gunfighting were of considerably less import than his talents at politicking. He in turn had the power to dispense patronage by selecting his own deputies. As a result, the post of U.S. marshal was so profitable that when it fell vacant it tended to attract a flood of aspirants. In 1882, three weeks after a vacancy occurred in New Mexico, an Albuquerque newspaper reported: "The President is still holding off the appointment of a U.S. marshal. It is understood there are fifty-one applications, with sixty-four bushels of petitions and seventy-three barrels of recommendations on hand."

The men who won in such scrambles for office were sometimes conspicuously lacking in integrity or experience in law enforcement. Among the U.S. marshals who held sway in the state of Colorado were a wholesale liquor dealer, a real estate agent, a bank appraiser and a manufacturer of soft drinks. During its earlier days, as a territory, Colorado had fared even worse in the selection of a chief peace officer. Its first U.S. marshal, appointed in 1861, was arrested for embezzling federal funds. The second, an ex-judge of the Denver municipal court, was better behaved. But the third resigned his office facing charges of larceny and of passing counterfeit money. The fourth was convicted of fattening his purse by making fraudulent claims against the federal government, and served two years in Leavenworth penitentiary.

Skulduggery in high places either amused or enraged the average citizen of the West, but naturally his chief concern with law enforcement, or the lack of it, lay closer to home. When he had complaints to register, he might send a letter to some august official with an office hundreds of miles away, remote and unreachable, but the official he saw face to face was one of two men with whom, like as not, he had more than a nodding acquaintance: the town marshal or the county sheriff. Between them, these two men served as the real mainstays of frontier law.

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