The Mammoth Book of the West (35 page)

Few other lawmen would receive such a fulsome tribute.

Harried town officials frequently appointed hardcase gunfighters to keep order, men who were little or no better than the rowdies they were intended to control. Thus did Ellsworth add the drunken loudmouth gunfighter known as John “Happy Jack” Morco to its police force. Morco, who had fled California after killing four unarmed men, antagonized Ellsworth’s cowboys and citizens alike, the latter numbering English-born gamblers Ben and Billy Thompson. After he had sparked a fracas in which Billy Thompson shot Sheriff Chauncey Whitney, Ellsworth finally dismissed Morco. He refused to be disarmed and had to be shot dead by a police colleague, J. C. Brown.

Morco was a far from isolated example. The number of men who spent as much time on the run from the law as they did wearing a badge is legion. “Mysterious” Dave Mather, reputed to be a descendant of puritan theologian Cotton Mather, had a career as a horse thief, train robber, con man (selling “gold bricks” to gullible cowboys, an enterprise in which he was partnered by Wyatt Earp), jailbreaker and road agent, as well as serving as a policeman in Las Vegas, New Kiowa in Kansas, and Dodge City. In Dodge he quarrelled with Deputy Marshal Tom Nixon – and shot him. (In 1888 Mather disappeared “mysteriously” and forever. Other lawmen who were prominent badmen were Jim Miller (paid assassin), Buffalo Bill Brooks (lynched as a horse thief), Lon Chambers (train robber), Jim Clark (thief), John Webb (extortionist, murderer and close friend of outlaw Dave Rudabaugh), Willard Christianson (rustler and bank robber), and Texas’s John
King Fisher (rustler), the last-named the West’s gaudiest gunman. He was once spotted by the Texas Rangers decked out in a pair of chaps made from the skin of a tiger he had shot at a circus, a beaver hat, a silk shirt and a brace of ivory-handled guns. Also from Texas was “Longhaired Jim” Courtright who began a protection racket in Fort Worth, where he used to be sheriff, in which gambling joints were “policed” in return for a share of the takings. The diminutive, fastidiously dressed gambler Luke Short, who owned a third of the White Elephant Saloon, refused to pay. Courtright sent a warning; the two men met in February 1887, and Courtright pulled a gun. The hammer caught in Short’s watch chain, giving Short time to pull his weapon and shoot Courtright three times. Courtright died within minutes.

On at least one occasion a lawman committed a major crime while actually in office. This was Henry Newton Brown of Caldwell, Kansas, who held up the bank in the neighbouring town of Medicine Lodge in May 1884, murdering the bank’s president. Brown and his accomplices were chased by citizens, Brown being shot in the process. His cohorts were lynched. Before hiring on as Caldwell’s town marshal, Brown had been a cattle rustler and had served as a “Regulator” alongside Billy the Kid during the Lincoln County War.

Such men as Brown, Courtright and Morco were tolerated in office if they did not abuse its privileges too outrageously, and above all kept order. So successful had Brown been at installing peace in Caldwell that only six months before his robbery of the Medicine Lodge bank, burghers had presented him with a new Winchester rifle and a silver plate commending his “valuable services to the citizens of Caldwell.” In a similar vein, when outlaw and gunfighter John Daly gained control of the Nevada mining town of Aurora in the early 1860s (through the neat
expedient of having an acolyte elected town marshal), the local newspaper, the
Esmeralda Star
, noted that the people bore this with “utter indifference”: not least, because the first man John Daly – now appointed deputy marshal – shot was an unruly member of his own gang, one George Lloyd.

To “tame” towns, different lawmen had different methods. Brown used both a pistol and a rifle to kill rowdies in Caldwell. Abilene’s Tom Smith employed his fists, spectacularly flooring town bully Big Hank and gunman “Wyoming Frank” on consecutive days in 1870. Shotguns loaded with buckshot were favoured by lawmen the West over, among them John “Don Juan” Slaughter of Apache County, Texas, and Oklahoma’s Heck Thomas. However, to the consternation of lawmen those they “took alive” often escaped justice. Jails were rudimentary – where they existed at all – and inmates absconded with alacrity.

To be counted amongst the most unusual lawmen of the West was New Mexico’s Elfego Baca. At the age of 19 Baca bought a mail-order badge, which he promptly used in October 1884 to “arrest” a cowboy called McCarty who was making Hispanics in the town of Frisco “dance” by shooting at their feet. After seizing the cowboy, Baca handed him over to the local justice of the peace. On the following day, however, 80 cowboys led by McCarty’s rancher employer intercepted Baca; one of the cowboys shot at him. Baca ran into a jacal, a wood-and-mud hut, shoved the inhabitants out, and managed to close the door in the face of rifle-wielding cowboy Jim Herne. Baca then shot the cowboy through the door.

Herne’s body was dragged away, and the cowboys began to shoot the jacal to pieces, keeping up volley after volley until dusk. The jacal, however, had a floor some 12 inches below ground level, and Baca was able to duck the
bullets. From time to time, he fired back with an accuracy that killed three more cowboys and wounded others. At midnight, the exasperated cowhands demolished most of the building with a stick of dynamite; Baca survived, crouched in an opposite corner behind a portion of roof which had been caved in by rifle fire.

To the disbelief of the cowboys, Baca was still alive next morning. They saw smoke from the chimney of the jacal. Baca was cooking breakfast.

The shooting continued until late afternoon, when deputy sheriff Ross intervened. Baca surrendered at 6.00 p.m., having withstood the siege by 80 gunmen for 36 hours. A later examination of the jacal revealed that the door alone had 367 bullet holes in it.

After the “miracle of the jacal”, Baca utilized his fame to secure various public posts, among them sheriff of Socorro County. One of his stratagems as a properly legal sheriff was to send letters to all the local fugitives telling them to surrender or suffer his wrath. A number of men actually complied. Baca died at the age of 80 having become one of New Mexico’s leading lawyers.

Perhaps the most outstanding peace officers in the West were some of those who worked under Evett Nix, the US Marshal of Oklahoma Territory. A former grocer, Nix was appointed (to some amazement) Marshal of the Territory by President Grover Cleveland in July 1893. What the ex-grocer brought to the task was organizational skill, and under his direction 150 deputy marshals were put into the field with an iron determination to end outlawry in the Territory. Nix set high standards, telling the
Guthrie Daily News
that he would have “none but honest men around me”. He added: “The time has gone for swashbucklers
who fence themselves round with revolvers and cartridges. A revolver will be for business and not for show.”

Nix’s sceptics accused him of “searching the ranks of democracy with a microscope to find this brand of Sunday school moralists from which to make sleuthhound saviours of banks and express trains.” The novice 32-year-old marshal quickly proved them wrong. His deputies included three of the greatest lawmen in the West, William Mathew (“Bill”) Tilghman, Chris Madsen and Henry Andrew “Heck” Thomas. The trio worked in semi-independence from their colleagues, hunting down major outlaws like the Doolin gang, and were quickly christened the “Three Guardsmen”.

Chris Madsen was an adventuring, red-haired Dane who, before pinning on the badge of a deputy, had fought in Italy for Garibaldi, in Africa for the French Foreign Legion and in the West for the US Cavalry. A spell as homesteader farmer had proved too tame and he accepted a commission for deputy US marshal, operating from El Reno, Oklahoma. The next year he was transferred to Guthrie and was highly active in pursuing fugitives until the outbreak of the Spanish–American War, when he joined the Rough Riders, a mounted regiment organized by Theodore Roosevelt. After returning from Cuba, Madsen re-entered law enforcement and in 1911 was appointed US Marshal for Oklahoma. Among those brought to justice by Madsen were Dalton/Doolin gang member Red Buck Weightman and train robber Felix Young.

In a famous episode in Beaver City, Oklahoma, in 1893 Madsen entered a saloon to stop drunken revellers shooting the place up, disarming one man by seizing his pistol. At this, another belligerent shouted: “I’m a son of a bitch from Cripple Creek.”

“I knew who you were,” replied Madsen, “but I didn’t
know where you were from.” A third reveller tried to pull a gun, but Madsen was quicker, and winged him in the shoulder.

Like Madsen, Heck Thomas saw service as soldier, joining the Stonewall Jackson Brigade of the Confederate Army when he was 12. He went to Texas after the Civil War, joining the Rangers, and earning a commendation from the governor for the single-handed capture of the two Lee brother outlaws. Before serving under Nix, Thomas had worked as a deputy for Judge Parker in Indian Territory. It was Heck Thomas’s shotgun that finally ended the career of outlaw Bill Doolin.

Bill Tilghman, the third of the Three Guardsmen, was already a renowned lawman before he came to Oklahoma, having served as the marshal of Dodge in 1884–6. When Oklahoma was opened up for White settlement in 1889 Tilghman took part in the land rush, but soon reverted to marshalling in the new Territory. Evett Nix offered this portrait of “Old Bill” Tilghman:

Tilghman was one of the handsomest men I ever knew – six feet tall, he weighed about one hundred and eighty pounds, and every ounce of it was sinuous muscle. His kind blue eyes and his open countenance reflected good will and friendliness to all he met. I have never known a man who regarded his enemies more kindly than did Bill Tilghman – and I have never known a man who fought his enemies more bitterly or more effectively than did Bill Tilghman when circumstances demanded it. Looking into his soft blue eyes, it was very hard to believe that the same eyes had looked down the barrels of flaming six-guns and rifles and dealt death to a great many men. During his service as my deputy, more rewards were paid to him for captures than were ever paid to any officer in the same period of time in the history of the United States.

Bill Tilghman was to serve longer than any of the lawmen made famous by the clean-up of Oklahoma Territory, and was voted a state senator. In 1915, incensed at the portrayal of federal officers in a movie depicting the bandit career of Al Jennings (whom Tilghman had pursued), the retired lawman directed a filmic riposte,
The Passing of the Oklahoma Outlaws
. Secretary of the company which produced it was Chris Madsen, and the movie’s underwriter was Evett Nix. The men saw themselves as setting the record straight.

Bill Tilghman died with his boots on. Aged 70, against the advice of friends, he became marshal of rowdy oil town Cromwell, Oklahoma. On the night of 21 November 1924, Tilghman heard a shot in the street and went to investigate. He found the offender and took his gun away. But the offender had a second gun, which he drew and shot the great lawman down.

The offender was a drunken federal prohibition agent.

Bill Tilghman was not the only ageing lawman to develop an interest in motion pictures. Wyatt Earp spent many of his twilight years in Hollywood, and even appeared as an extra in the 1916 Douglas Fairbanks feature
The Half Breed
. His admirers counted among them Western film stars Tom Mix and William S. Hart, both of whom were pallbearers at Earp’s 1920 funeral. Another of Earp’s Hollywood admirers was the young John Ford, later to direct the Earp biopic
My Darling Clementine
. Thus Earp took a strong hand in the creation of his own legend, simultaneously enlarging and sanitizing a career in “town taming” which, in truth, had little to justify his posthumous reputation as one of the West’s great heroes.

Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp came of pioneer stock, and was descended from a Virginian agrarian-lawyer clan who migrated westward in chain-like fashion, first to Monmouth, Illinois (where Earp was born on 19 March 1848), and then to Missouri, Kansas and by wagon train to South California.

Earp’s early career was as a teamster in California, Arizona and Wyoming, where he also refereed prizefights in the railroad camps. On 10 January 1870 he married
Irilla H. Sutherland, the daughter of a neighbour of Earp’s Illinois grandparents. The marriage lasted less than a year, when Irilla died in a typhoid epidemic. For some time afterwards, Earp drifted aimlessly. Near the town of Van Buren, Arkansas, he was caught horse-thieving, and was only saved from hanging by the intervention of his father. Nicholas Earp paid his son’s bail – and then suggested he abscond.

Wyatt Earp then took up buffalo hunting in Kansas, and during a visit to Ellsworth in 1873 was offered a job as marshal. He refused. But in 1874 he arrived in Wichita, then the boom town of the cattle trade, where his invalid Civil War-veteran brother James was a bartender and James’s wife Bessie ran a brothel. With the buffalo fast disappearing, Earp decided to hire on as a policeman, serving under Sheriff Mike Meagher. Most of Deputy Earp’s duty consisted of patrolling Wichita’s red light district, Delano, and ensuring that the cowboys who thronged the town observed the Deadline, the boundary which they were not allowed to cross wearing firearms. Among the transgressors Earp was obliged to arrest was the giant, 220-pound Texas cattleman Abel “Shanghai” Pierce. On this occasion, Pierce was too drunk to be dangerous. Earp himself was eventually kicked off the force for fighting and for neglecting to turn in fines collected from prostitutes.

In 1876 Earp moved to Dodge, then at the height of its infamous reputation as the “Gomorrah of the Plains”. Earp served two periods on the town’s police force, 1876–7 and 1878–9, rising to become assistant marshal. It was during his sojourns in Dodge that Earp made friends with lawmen Luke Short and Bat Masterson and joined the “Dodge City Gang”, a cartel which controlled the local liquor, gambling and prostitution business. Another member of the Gang was John Henry “Doc” Holliday, a tubercular sometime
dentist turned gambler. The son of a Confederate officer, the sad-faced alcoholic was mercurial in temper but an unrelenting racist. His first victims were two Negro boys who dared share a swimming-hole near his Georgia home. In Dodge he lived with – and was possibly married to – the prostitute Kate Elder, better known as “Big Nose Kate”. According to some accounts, Holliday saved Earp’s life in Dodge by disarming a rowdy cowboy.