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Gunslinger Saints

Day Of The Gunfighter

The midday sun bakes the raw trail's end cow town. The rutted street bordered by frame houses is deserted, even the benches on the drover's hotel porch are empty. There is a menacing stillness, a sense of suppressed violence about to explode.

Suddenly the gunfighter appears. He is tall, tanned to the color of old saddle leather. Under the rim of his sombrero his blue eyes are cold, steady. Holsters with six-shooters are tied to his thighs with buckskin thongs. He advances slowly down the street, hands casually hanging at his sides.

Men and women peer anxiously from doorways and windows. In the livery a horse, waiting to be shod, snorts impatiently. A hot breeze toys with the dust. Somewhere a door slams.

Then another man appears. There is an arrogance in his walk. Like the gunfighter he wears guns. He approaches, stops. For a long moment they take each other's measure in the taut silence. Almost as if someone had given a signal, the hands of both men flash to the butts of their guns. The stillness is shattered by the roar of single-action Colt .45s. The gunfighter continues to stand erect, untouched while his opponent slowly crumples. The town erupts, men and women pouring out into the street, some looking with awe at the gunfighter who calmly, almost sadly, holsters his gun and walks away while others bend over the man who was dead before his body hit the ground.

This trite, ritualized scene has been played countless times in books, songs, ballads, on television, and in movies, always with the gunfighter as the central character.

He is one of our nation's most popular folklore figures, more popular than Washington's Continentals, Lee's cavalrymen, troopers of the Indian Fighting Army, mountain men, explorers, miners, loggers, prizefighters, and rivermen.

His specific crimes or acts of violence are largely forgotten, but the romantic pageantry remains. Perhaps evil is more interesting than goodness.

In reality the gunfighter lived in the Wild West from about the time of the founding of the cow towns after the end of the Civil War to the 1880s. By the turn of the century the few survivors were frontier anachronisms unable to cope with a more sophisticated society. They were finally done in by barbed wire, the telephone, and a more effective form of law enforcement which, ironically, they had helped to establish.

Richard Fox's pink Police Gazette first molded their image. Its circulation was enormous; it has been estimated that the male half of the population of the latter part of the nineteenth century read the Gazette in cow camps, saloons, barbershops, bordellos, pool halls, gambling houses, and livery stables. The paper passed from hand to hand until it literally fell apart.

Fox's editors quickly recognized the inherent drama of the gunfighter. In every story he was handsome, a superb horseman, a skilled marksman who provided the oppressed with life, liberty, and an opportunity to pursue happiness.

His motivation for entering a life of danger and self-destruction was usually a false arrest, a father killed by corrupt lawmen in the pay of a mortgage holder, or the most popular version - a southern cavalier, a patriot of the Confederacy, who had been driven into outlawry by his ruthless enemies in the North.

Frank Leslie's Weekly and Harper's, while generally more factual and less garish, also focused on the Wild West, assigning special correspondents like Theodore Davis, a superb Civil War artist. Writers sent back stories of wild stagecoach rides, Indian attacks, buffalo hunts, cattle drives, railroading, the trials and tribulations of homesteaders - and interviews and sketches of gunfighters.

Together with the Gazette, many frontier newspapers, and Beadle's dime novels, they helped to make the bloodletters romantic figures, majestic in their bearing, Lochinvars of the cow towns.

The saga of Wild Bill Hickok is an excellent example of how they turned an obscure stock tender into an imperishable American hero. When Colonel George Ward Nichols of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, who had fought with Sherman during the Civil War, met the handsome Hickok on the frontier, he was completely lost, swallowing Wild Bill's outrageous lies of how he had killed a band of desperados at the Rock Creek Overland Stage Depot in Nebraska. The tall tale was believed by generations; it wasn't until 1927 when George W. Hansen's article in the Nebraska History Magazine exposed the fraud and revealed how Hickok had cold-bloodedly killed two unarmed men and watched while a third was beaten to death with a hoe.

In contrast, Billy the Kid, known across the world as one of the leading actors in the Wild West, was portrayed as an adenoidal moronic killer. A cache of extant, little known official documents in Washington, D.C., reveals the incredible role he played as leader of a group of ranchers fighting a powerful frontier ring of corrupt officials.

Who were these men? Where did they come from? Were they all illiterate, psychotic killers? What is the truth of their lives and their legendary exploits?

Ironically you can find some of the answers in their own writings. Some wrote their autobiographies or assisted their biographers; others supplied material for newspaper feature stories or serials; nearly all had been interviewed by reporters, not only from frontier newspapers but from New York City papers. They also wrote letters to editors, complaining that the news accounts of their time portrayed them inaccurately.

Despite the horrors of Huntsville prison, John Wesley Hardin read law, emerged a lawyer, and wrote his autobiography. Ben Thompson, who, Bat Masterson claimed, had no peer in the fast draw, was elected marshal of Austin, made that community one of the safest in Texas, and spent a great deal of time with his biographer, a respected judge.

Billy the Kid's letters to New Mexico's territorial governor, Lew Wallace, the author of Ben Hur, and his affidavit to Washington agent Frank Warner Angel (sent to investigate official corruption in the Territory) are impressive proof he was not illiterate.

Tom Horn, who hired his gun to the cattle barons, finished his autobiography just before he was executed.

Their accounts are difficult to find. Many of their books were published by local newspapers or job shops as paperbacks. They were sold in small quantities by "candy butchers" on trains and quickly disappeared. Some issues of frontier newspapers are not even in the Library of Congress or state historical societies and can only be found in smaller regional or private collections.

The gunfighters all had enormous egos. Harvey Logan, the deadly Kid Curry of the Wild Bunch, wrote to a friend in Montana that after he escaped from the Knoxville jail in 1901 his exploits would "outshine" those of Harry Tracy, another gunfighter and killer then being hunted in the Northwest.

Wild Bill Hickok preened like a peacock, strutting in Fifth Avenue fashion about the cow towns and rough army posts. Harry Tracy, while he admitted that newspapermen were more to be feared than the bullets of the posses, usually advised his victims to notify the nearest sheriff so photographers could take their pictures and mention his name. Tom Horn bitterly excoriated the "yellow journals" of his day for convicting him in the press but never refused an interview and posed gladly for visiting photographers while he waited execution.

They lived and died by the gun. Single-action Colt .45s, fashioned to a hair-trigger response, oiled and polished daily like a favorite deadly toy, sawed-off shotguns, rifles, derringers, army and navy Colts - were all used. Confrontations took place in saloons, alleys, streets, and other public places.

Curiously, several of these cold, calculating killers were among the best lawmen in the Wild West. Only a thin, almost invisible line separated them from the posts of marshal and sheriff. Their expertise with guns was badly needed as the wild cow towns flourished after the Civil War by rushing beef to the East. For the killer to cross the line was simple: the harassed, perhaps terrified town council, after quickly voting to hire the gunfighter, gave him their blessing and a tin star. They knew he had the raw courage to wade into a mob of drunken armed young Texans fresh from a long drive.

Gamblers were also intimidated and prevented from cheating the cowhands - unless they had made an "arrangement." "He (Wild Bill Hickok) broke up all the unfair gambling, made professional gamblers move their tables into the light and when they became drunk stopped the games," Joseph G. McCoy, mayor of Abilene recalled. He had hired Hickok in 1871 for $150 a month and 25 percent of all imposed fines. Wild Bill was charged by Abilene's town council to be "industrious and vigilant" in bringing offenders to justice and to control or prevent all "affrays, riots and breaches of peace." Any vagrant, drunk, "or former Confederate soldier" caught carrying a pistol, bowie knife, dirk or deadly weapon was fined $100 or three months in jail.

The town fathers were also aware that the gunfighter's reputation as a man killer would be enough to make any would-be desperado turn around and ride off. As the old rustler's jingle went: When we turned our sixes loose, we let the sheriff know, It took a joe dandy to bring us back from Mexico!

The gunfighter's fame, however, made his life a prize. A hasty killing was often then a premium on the only sort of life insurance he could carry. He had to be quick to strike and ready to do so at the slightest provocation or forfeit his rank and fame - and perhaps his life. "Fair play is a jewel," King Fisher of Texas once said, "but I don't care for jewelry."

Was the gunfighter a coward or a valiant? The question can be safely answered only by saying that sometimes he was one and sometimes the other.

While being held in a frontier jail for trial on charges of murder, one said: "It's all right to talk about courage but courage is a mighty peculiar thing, and nobody's got it with him all the time. Take me on a sunshiny day, full of good grub and with a couple of drinks under my belt, I'd stand up to a regiment and take my chances; but take me on before daybreak in the rain, hungry and cold, and I'd run from one Greaser if he was hunting me. . ."

The bravest of them had their moments of weakness. It was said there were times when Wild Bill Hickok went to sleep "as nervous as an old maid peering under her bed for intruders." He would spread the floor with newspapers, to be awakened by the rustling. He personally inspected all doors and windows and refused to lie in line with a window. A light sleeper, he was up a dozen times at night. Charles Michelson, who knew many of the gunfighters and badmen of the Wild West, described in Munsey's Magazine of 1901 how Wild Bill entered a room: "He would never enter a place and walk up the middle of the floor, or turn his back to the door. His mode of entry was to step swiftly across the threshold of a room and move to one side so that nobody who saw him enter could shoot him from the outside. Next, standing close to the wall, he would survey the room, noting every person in it. Then he would make his way along the wall to the bar or wherever he desired to go. It may be noted that this was caution made necessary by the knowledge that many men would assassinate him at the first opportunity. . ."

They were not all cavaliers of myth.

Kid Curry patiently waited all night to ambush Jim Winters, the Montana stockman who had killed his younger brother, Johnny. Tracy cold-bloodedly murdered the guards he had held as hostages. Wild Bill, firing from behind a curtain, killed the unarmed McCanles at the Rock Creek stage station. Ben Thompson tried to talk the teen-age John Wesley Hardin into killing Hickok when he was sheriff of Abilene. Billy the Kid gunned down the guards in his famous escape from the Lincoln jail.

Yet, these dangerous men who lived by their own codes were capable of incongruous acts of kindness, generosity, and loyalty. Tom Horn could have saved his life by naming the cattle barons who had hired him to kill rustlers, homesteaders, small ranchers, and sheepherders, but he greeted the offer with contempt. Lips sealed, he went to the gallows.

Billy the Kid, a wandering, homeless orphan, supported the maverick young ranchers fighting the powerful, corrupt Santa Fe Ring, although he knew his life could have been easier, more affluent, if he had pledged his gun to the other side.

In the last moments of his life, the wounded Kid Curry committed suicide rather than be a burden to his companions as a posse closed in.

The indomitable Tracy was trapped because he lingered to help a farmer build his barn.

They all had an extraordinary attraction for women. To the bored, restless frontier women, imprisoned in remote farmhouses, log cabins, ranches, and puritanical eighteenth-century towns, the gunfighter was a romantic hero in contrast to the bone-tired, dull, hardworking men who surrounded them. In their wretched loneliness these women often created fantasy in which the gunfighter in jail, on the dodge, or just passing through had come to rescue them.

The wives of the farmers who willingly prepared meals for Harry Tracy remembered him as "a gentleman . . . very soft spoken and courteous." Kid Curry dazzled the matrons of Knoxville to such a degree that the sheriff was forced to cut off the flow of packages of flowers, love letters, and "fine foods" that crowded his cell. One may have assisted him to escape.

An attractive schoolteacher desperately tried to save Horn from hanging, and Hickok lived with a succession of tarts, finally marrying a high-wire artist and equestrian, who is credited with inventing the two-ring circus.

Yet, some had loving wives and children, owned property, and were regarded with respect, admiration, and affection by people in their communities. Ben Thompson's estate disclosed he was a man of some affluence; his funeral cortege was one of the longest in Austin's history. For months after his death, Texas newspapers editorially demanded that prosecutors start grand jury probes to determine if he had been cut down by hidden assassins.

In El Paso, John Wesley Hardin was a respected lawyer with a good practice until he was shot from behind by a lawman who himself had once been a desperado and wanted man.

In our time, Hollywood's films and television's electronic tube have become the modern mythmakers of the West. After the movies emerged from Coney Island peep shows, the West became the most popular and profitable subject. The plots were simple, a weeping heroine and stalwart gunfighter, upholding law and order, played their roles against the cattle town facade built in Fort Lee, New Jersey. By the Great Depression, westerns were Hollywood's bread and butter items. In the 1950s gunfighters were seen almost every night on television, fanning the hammers of their guns in the backlot streets. Apparently no one told the producers that the guns of the West were mostly inaccurate and in reality any man slamming his hand down on a heavy Colt .45 would have been a candidate for the local Boot Hill.

From this endless flow of silly fiction we have come to regard the gunfighter of the Wild West as a flawless fighting machine, walking down the street at high noon to kill an enemy in an awesome display of his fast draw. Such is not the case. Some, as Meredith said, were caught in the "incredible imbroglio of comedy."

What of New Mexico's Governor Lew Wallace who indignantly wrote to Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz that the jailed Billy the Kid was being serenaded by groups of citizens who stood outside the outlaw's cell window?

What of Kid Curry who hurled himself through a rear door of a saloon to escape a posse only to fall into a deep railroad gulch?

What of the frontier editor who received an indignant note from Wild Bill Hickok insisting he was very much alive and had not been killed in a gunfight?

What of Ben Thompson, whom Bat Masterson called the West's premier gunslinger, denouncing the villain of East Lynn, firing his six-shooter at the actors and laughing as the theatre emptied? The shots were blanks.

But not all is comedy. Billy the Kid coolly called out a greeting and killed the guard Olinger as he escaped from jail. Tracy shot the guards from the wall of the Oregon Penitentiary and Tom Horn, who boasted murder was his business, cut down a sheepherder's fourteen-year-old son. . .

Many times the truth is more exciting, more romantic. Conveying the authentic rather than mere debunking is the point of this book. In the case of the gunfighter, myth and legend have always had an incestuous relationship with fact and reality. The broadest truth about these strange, violent figures is that even well before the turn of the century they had been isolated as anarchic men of action in a nation slowly but steadily moving toward regimentation in lawful and orderly communities.

One finds this appeal of the gunfighter of America's Wild West is now worldwide. Outside Paris, in a replica of a western cow town, famous gunfights are played and replayed by aficionados. In Italy their lives and times are discussed by some with as much gravity as the current political crisis. In London a group issues a scholarly publication. From a tiny village near the Arctic Circle a correspondent sends a thoughtful letter, detailing the relationship between Billy the Kid and the Santa Fe Ring.

Yet, for all this international attention and magnification, an examination of their lives yields the commonplace conclusion that crime does not pay. They were men of evil, ruthless killers who could scorn fair play and shoot from ambush. Ironically, therefore, they helped to develop the very forces that destroyed them. Certainly the killings they committed, even in the name of law and order, did point up the corruption of some sheriffs and marshals and the cowardice of others and finally awakened the frontier communities to seek out better men to protect them.

The gunfighters, saints and sinners, are a vital part of the history of the western frontier. Unfortunately, the saints are often tarnished while the sinners blaze on in the ballads and myths of a nation. Nonetheless, giving the devil his due and perhaps jostling the angels in the process, we admire their shared vitality, enormous self-confidence, courage, gusto, individuality, and irrepressible independence - the archetypal American character.

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