The Mammoth Book of the West (21 page)

They may have been disorderly and dangerous, but Texas cowboys were also very good business. During the cattle season, 300–400 cowpunchers could ride into town daily to spend their wages. A town could take as much as $40,000 in its tills each day. Much of the money would go to saloons and “soiled doves” (prostitutes), but a good chunk would also go to the bootmakers, grocers and other citizens of substance. The difficulty for the towns was finding a way of containing the cowboys’ violence without implementing a law-and-order regime which was so puritanically iron-clad it put them off visiting. The solution hit upon was to allow the rowdy “dens of sin” the cowboys demanded but to either restrict their number or congregate them in a particular area of town. To enforce law and order a small police force was hired. Astutely, their costs were often met by charging the brothels, saloons and gambling houses a licence fee and implementing a system of fines for such offences as carrying a
concealed weapon. According to the Topeka
Daily Commonwealth
, the rival town of Ellsworth

. . . realizes $300 per month from prostitution fines alone . . . The city authorities consider that as long as mankind is depraved and Texan cattle herders exist, there will be a demand and necessity for prostitutes, and that as long as prostitutes are bound to dwell in Ellsworth it is better for the respectable portion of society to hold prostitutes under restraint of law.

When the cowboy fresh off the trail arrived in town, however, sin was not his immediate preoccupation. After hitching his horse he usually headed for the nearest barber shop, for a haircut and a proper shaping, blacking and waxing of his long moustache. His head spruced, he then went to the dry-goods store to buy a new set of clothes. Preferably these were gaudy and expensive. The outfit chosen by Teddy Blue Abbott, who rode the Texas trails in the 1870s, was by no means untypical:

I had a new white Stetson hat that I paid ten dollars for and new pants that cost twelve dollars, and a good shirt and fancy boots. They had colored tops, red and blue, with a half-moon and star on them. Lord, I was proud of those clothes! They were the kind of clothes top hands wore, and I thought I was dressed right for the first time in my life.

Decked out in his new finery, the cowboy completed his ritual of preparation by walking to the best hotel in town, and ordering a meal of eggs, ice cream and fresh oysters. The elite establishment in Abilene was the Drover’s Cottage, where J. W. and Lou Gore served drinks with ice cut from the Republican the previous winter and stored in a
cellar. With the demise of Abilene, the Gores hauled over part of the hotel building to Ellsworth to establish a Drover’s Cottage there.

His stomach full, the cowboy was ready for entertainment. The cowtowns’ saloons and dance-halls were often bunched together outside town limits, usually a short walk across the railroad tracks. In Abilene, the vice district was known as the Devil’s Addition, in Ellsworth it was Nauchville, and in Newton Hide Park. The sinning area of Dodge City, “Queen of the cowtowns”, was the Red Light district, named after the Red Light House, a two-storey frame brothel with red glass in the front door, through which light shone in lurid welcome. From Dodge, the name would go all over the globe. Another term Dodge would bequeath the world was “Boot Hill”, because so many of its citizens were buried in the town cemetery with their boots on after gunfights. The first to occupy the Dodge cemetery was an African-American cowboy called Texas, who was shot by a gambler called Denver.

Cowboys were congenital gamblers. They played cards in the bunkhouse, and around the camp fire on the trail, but it only became meaningful in a saloon, where they could pit their wits and money against a professional. The saloons of the trail towns boasted names which were promisingly colourful – the Crystal Palace, the Alhambra, Old Fruit – or consciously designed to appeal to Texans, like the Lone Star and the Alamo. Some were gaudy to the rafters. The Alamo in Abilene had three sets of double glass doors, and giant murals of nudes in imitation Italian Renaissance style. Music blared incessantly from piano and bull fiddle. Wild Bill Hickok was an almost constant fixture in the Alamo during his period as marshal. In 1871 a reporter from the
Daily Kansas State Record
described the scene inside the saloon: “A bartender, with a countenance
like a youthful divinity student, fabricates wonderful drinks, while the music of a piano and a violin from a raised recess, enlivens the scene, and ‘soothes the savage breasts’ of those who retire torn and lacerated from an unfortunate combat with the tiger.”

The card games cowboys liked were faro, monte, and poker. They distrusted fancy games and any sort of gambling machinery. Many lost their wages to the gamblers and sharps. As the cowboys played, so they drank. They favoured whiskey – bourbon, rye, or corn – or “Kansas sheep-dip” as they called it. (Very strong whiskey was a “Brigham Young cocktail”, since it made a man a “confirmed polygamist”.) The combination of alcohol and cards could have fatal results, as with the cowboy Texas buried in Dodge’s Boot Hill. A verse from the old song “The Cowboy’s Lament” warned wisely:

It was once in the saddle I used to go dashing,
Once in the saddle I used to go gay;
First to the dram house, then to the card house,
Got shot in the breast, I am dying today.

There were other ways to die in a saloon than by calling “cheat”. Saloons bred drunken rowdiness, horse-play that spilled easily from camaraderie to the hasty pulling of a knife or gun. To refuse a drink was to breach bar-room etiquette, and led to the deaths of numerous men. Some saloons just seemed to spawn violence, like Shorty Young’s Bucket of Blood Saloon in Le Harve, Montana, which caused cowboys to apply the name to any tough frontier whiskey-mill. Cowboy violence almost always took the form of knives or “manstoppers” (guns). Fisticuffs was unmanly. “If the Lord had intended me to fight like a dog,” as one cowboy put it, “He’d a-give me longer teeth and claws.”

After some hands of monte and “Kansas sheep-dip”, the mind of many a cowboy turned ineluctably to female companionship. There were few “respectable” women in a cowtown; the only women a poor cowboy associated with were prostitutes and dance-hall girls, who careered around the floor with the cowboy for a price. Joe McCoy drew a vivid picture of the cowtown dance-hall in his 1874 memoir,
Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade in the West and Southwest
.

Few more wild, reckless scenes of abandoned debauchery can be seen on the civilised earth, than a dance hall in full blast in one of the many frontier towns. To say they dance wildly or in an abandoned manner is putting it mildly . . . The cowboy enters the dance with a particular zest, not stopping to divest himself of his sombrero, spurs or pistols, but just as he dismounts off his cow-pony, so he goes into the dance. A more odd, not to say comical sight is not often seen than the dancing cowboy: with the front of his sombrero lifted at an angle of 45 degrees, his huge spurs jangling at every step or motion, his revolvers flapping up and down like a retreating sheep’s tail, his eyes lit up with excitement, liquor and lust, he plunges into it and “hoes it down” at a terrible rate in the most approved yet awkward country style, often swinging his partner clear off the floor for an entire circle; then “balance all” with an occasional demonic yell near akin to the war whoop of the savage Indian. All this he does entirely oblivious to the whole world and the rest of mankind.

Although civic-minded reformers tried to ban them, prostitutes graced most cowtowns, entering the periodic census under such euphemisms as “horizontally employed” or “night worker”. The occupation of Ettie
Baldwin in the 1870 Ellsworth census was written in red ink as “squirms in the dark”. The prostitutes came from all over America, the fortunate ones working out of brothels under a madam, where there was some comfort and hygiene. Most “soiled doves” or “calico queens”, however, worked above saloons or dance-halls, or in rough wooden shacks known as “cribs”.

There was little stigma attached to a visit to a “crib” or “sporting house” (although Black cowboys were not allowed to visit White houses of prostitution). Not infrequently the cowboys formed strong attachments to the girls. Teddy Blue Abbott, in his autobiography, was unapologetic about the relationship between cowpunchers and prostitutes:

I suppose those things would shock a lot of respectable people. But we wasn’t respectable and we didn’t pretend to be, which was the only way we was different from some others. I’ve heard a lot about the double standard, and seen a lot of it, too, and it don’t make any sense for the man to get off so easily. If I’d been a woman and done what I done I’d have ended up in a sporting house.

I used to talk to those girls, and they would tell me a lot of stuff, about how they got started, and how in Chicago and those eastern cities they wasn’t allowed on the streets, how their clothes would be taken away from them, only what they needed in the house, so it was like being in prison.

They could do as they pleased out here. And they were human, too. They always had money and they would lend it to fellows that were broke. The wagon bosses would come around looking for men in the spring, and when a fellow was hired he would go to his girl and say: “I’ve got a job, but my bed’s in soak.” Or his saddle or his six-shooter or his horse. And she would lend him the money to get it back and he would pay her at the end of the month.

For every woman in a trail town there were eight men wanting companionship. Disputes over affections were inevitable. None, however, had such a bloody consequence as that between Mike McCluskie and the gambler Bill Bailey, the so-called Newton “General Massacre”.

Newton’s reign as the “Cowboy Capital” lasted for the single frenzied year of 1871, before the lines of the Santa Fe railroad pushed ineluctably on to Wichita. Among those charged with the keeping of Newton’s order was Mike McCluskie, a night policeman, who formed an attachment to a prostitute who worked the red light district of Hide Park. Texan gambler Bill Bailey, alias William Wilson, was a rival for her favours. On the evening of Friday 11 August, the two men had a drunken argument over the woman in the bar of the Red Front saloon. Bailey ran out of the saloon into the street, McCluskie following with his pistol drawn. As Bailey crouched in the dark, McCluskie shot him. The gambler was taken to the Santa Fe hotel, where he later died.

Many of the people of the town considered the shooting justified, but Bailey had numerous friends among the Texan cowboys who had just come up the Chisholm Trail. One of these, the young and unstable Hugh Anderson, decided on revenge. Past midnight on Saturday 19 August, Anderson, accompanied by several friends, walked into the bright lights of Perry Tuttle’s dance-hall, and over to the gaming table where McCluskie was sitting. Drawing his pistol, Anderson screamed at McCluskie: “You cowardly dog! I’m going to blow the top of your head off!” Anderson fired twice. One bullet entered McCluskie’s neck, but he managed to stagger up and pull the trigger of his revolver. The hammer failed to detonate the cap, McCluskie collapsed onto the floor, and Anderson shot him again, this time in the back.

The matter might have ended there, except that a youthful watching stranger pulled a gun and began blazing away at the Texans. (The gunfighter would never be positively identified, although a contemporary poem by Theodore F. Price would name him as a consumptive friend of McCluskie’s called Riley.) A pitched battle ensued. Bystanders screamed and dived for the floor. Someone hurled a chair at the lights, and orange flashes of gunshot glowed in the darkness.

The shooting lasted for a bare minute, petering out in the uncertainty of the dark and the cries of the wounded. When the lights were turned on they revealed a scene of carnage.

Hugh Anderson was writhing and moaning in a pool of his own blood. Three of his trail crew – Jim Martin, Billy Garrett, Henry Kearns – were dead. Another hand, Jim Wilkerson, was badly wounded. A railwayman, Pat Lee, was mortally shot through the stomach. The “Avenging Nemesis” had disappeared.

On his arrival the marshal, Tom Carson, moved to arrest the surviving members of Anderson’s crew, but the Texans gathered in an armed knot. Something like a street riot threatened to break out, and the marshal withdrew.

At eight o’clock the next morning Hugh Anderson was found guilty of murder of Mike McCluskie by a Newton coroner’s jury. But before he could be arrested the wounded man was hidden by friends in the washroom of a train and taken away. He survived his injuries but would be killed three years later in a fight at Medicine Lodge, Kansas, by a man said to be Mike McCluskie’s brother.

The “General Massacre” did not end Newton’s summer of violence. The dance-hall owner Rowdy Joe Lowe killed Jim Sweet in a street fight. Buffalo hunter Cherokee Dan Hicks fell to a bullet from the revolver of Harry Lovett, after Hicks had shot up the nude frieze in Lovett’s
saloon. At this the marshal, Tom Carson, a nephew of the trapper Kit Carson, resigned his post. Newton was getting too hot. Captain King took over, until he was killed by a man whose name has only come down to us as Edwards.

Something of the violence which plagued Newton, and the other Kansas cattle towns, had its bitter roots in the Civil War. The Texan cowboys came north with resentment in their hearts. Some still wore items of their distinctive Rebel grey uniforms. As Teddy Blue Abbott explained it:

Most of them that came up with the trail herds, being from Texas and southerners to start with, was on the side of the South, and oh, but they were bitter. That was how a lot of them got killed, because they wouldn’t let an abolitionist arrest them. The marshals in these cow towns were usually northern men, and the Southerns wouldn’t go back to Texas and hear people say: “He’s a hell of a fellow. He let a Yankee lock him up.” Down home one Texas Ranger could arrest the lot of them, but up North, you’d have to kill them first.

As Abbott observed, many of the lawmen who would ply their trade in the tough Kansas cattle towns were Northerners: Bat Masterson, Wild Bill Hickok, Captain King, and Tom Smith, among them. The unfinished business of the Civil War would be finished by these men and the towns who employed them, the means by which the wild, unreconstructed Rebels would be incorporated into the civilizing Union. A dividing line of blood would run between Southern outlaws and Northern peacekeepers throughout the history of the Wild West.