The Story of the Outlaw: A Study of the Western Desperado
by Emerson Hough · English · Gutenberg #24342 · 492,359 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Story of the Outlaw: A Study of the Western Desperado
Author: Emerson Hough
Release date: January 17, 2008 [eBook #24342]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF THE OUTLAW: A STUDY OF THE WESTERN DESPERADO ***
Produced by D. Alexander and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)
THE
STORY OF THE OUTLAW
_A STUDY OF THE WESTERN DESPERADO_
WITH HISTORICAL NARRATIVES OF FAMOUS OUTLAWS;
THE STORIES OF NOTED BORDER WARS;
VIGILANTE MOVEMENTS AND ARMED
CONFLICTS ON THE FRONTIER
BY
EMERSON HOUGH
NEW YORK
THE OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY
1907
COPYRIGHT, 1905, BY
THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY
EMERSON HOUGH
Entered at Stationers' Hall, London, England
_All Rights Reserved_
THE OUTING PRESS
DEPOSIT, N. Y.
The Story of the Outlaw
[Illustration: From a painting by John W. Norton
PLUMMER'S MEN HOLDING UP THE BANNACK STAGE
(_See page 119_)]
PREFACE
In offering this study of the American desperado, the author constitutes
himself no apologist for the acts of any desperado; yet neither does he
feel that apology is needed for the theme itself. The outlaw, the
desperado--that somewhat distinct and easily recognizable figure
generally known in the West as the "bad man"--is a character unique in
our national history, and one whose like scarcely has been produced in
any land other than this. It is not necessary to promote absurd and
melodramatic impressions regarding a type properly to be called
historic, and properly to be handled as such. The truth itself is
thrilling enough, and difficult as that frequently has been of
discovery, it is the truth which has been sought herein.
A thesis on the text of disregard for law might well be put to better
use than to serve merely as exciting reading, fit to pass away an idle
hour. It might, and indeed it may--if the reader so shall choose--offer
a foundation for wider arguments than those suggested in these pages,
which deal rather with premises than conclusions. The lesson of our
dealings with our bad men of the past can teach us, if we like, the best
method of dealing with our bad men to-day.
There are other lessons which we might take from an acquaintance with
frontier methods of enforcing respect for the law; and the first of
these is a practical method of handling criminals in the initial
executive acts of the law. Never were American laws so strong as to-day,
and never were our executive officers so weak. Our cities frequently are
ridden with criminals or rioters. We set hundreds of policemen to
restore order, but order is not restored. What is the average policeman
as a criminal-taker? Cloddy and coarse of fiber, rarely with personal
heredity of mental or bodily vigor, with no training at arms, with no
sharp, incisive quality of nerve action, fat, unwieldy, unable to run a
hundred yards and keep his breath, not skilled enough to kill his man
even when he has him cornered, he is the archetype of all unseemliness
as the agent of a law which to-day needs a sterner upholding than ever
was the case in all our national life. We use this sort of tools in
handling criminals, when each of us knows, or ought to know, that the
city which would select twenty Western peace officers of the old type
and set them to work without restrictions as to the size of their
imminent graveyards, would free itself of criminals in three months'
time, and would remain free so long as its methods remained in force.
As for the subject-matter of the following work, it may be stated that,
while attention has been paid to the great and well-known instances and
epochs of outlawry, many of the facts given have not previously found
their way into print. The story of the Lincoln County War of the
Southwest is given truthfully for the first time, and after full
acquaintance with sources of information now inaccessible or passing
away. The Stevens County War of Kansas, which took place, as it were,
but yesterday and directly at our doors, has had no history but a
garbled one; and as much might be said of many border encounters whose
chief use heretofore has been to curdle the blood in penny-dreadfuls.
Accuracy has been sought among the confusing statements purporting to
constitute the record in such historic movements as those of the
"vigilantes" of California and Montana mining days, and of the later
cattle days when "wars" were common between thieves and outlaws, and the
representatives of law and order,--themselves not always duly
authenticated officers of the law.
No one man can have lived through the entire time of the American
frontier; and any work of this kind must be in part a matter of
compilation in so far as it refers to matters of the past. In all cases
where practicable, however, the author has made up the records from
stories of actual participants, survivors and eye-witnesses; and he is
able in some measure to write of things and men personally known during
twenty-five years of Western life. Captain Patrick F. Garrett, of New
Mexico, central figure of the border fighting in that district in the
early railroad days, has been of much service in extending the author's
information on that region and time. Mr. Herbert M. Tonney, now of
Illinois, tells his own story as a survivor of the typical county-seat
war of Kansas, in which he was shot and left for dead. Many other men
have offered valuable narratives.
In dealing with any subject of early American history, there is no
authority more incontestable than Mr. Alexander Hynds, of Dandridge,
Tennessee, whose acquaintance with singular and forgotten bits of early
frontier history borders upon the unique in its way. Neither does better
authority exist than Hon. N. P. Langford, of Minnesota, upon all matters
having to do with life in the Rocky Mountain region in the decade of
1860-1870. He was an argonaut of the Rockies and a citizen of Montana
and of other Western territories before the coming of the days of law.
Free quotations are made from his graphic work, "Vigilante Days and
Ways," which is both interesting of itself and valuable as a historical
record.
The stories of modern train-robbing bandits and outlaw gangs are taken
partly from personal narratives, partly from judicial records, and
partly from works frequently more sensational than accurate, and
requiring much sifting and verifying in detail. Naturally, very many
volumes of Western history and adventure have been consulted. Much of
this labor has been one of love for the days and places concerned, which
exist no longer as they once did. The total result, it is hoped, will
aid in telling at least a portion of the story of the vivid and
significant life of the West, and of that frontier whose van, if ever
marked by human lawlessness, has, none the less, ever been led by the
banner of human liberty. May that banner still wave to-day, and though
blood be again the price, may it never permanently be replaced by that
of license and injustice in our America.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE DESPERADO 1
II THE IMITATION DESPERADO 14
III THE LAND OF THE DESPERADO 22
IV THE EARLY OUTLAW 35
V THE VIGILANTES OF CALIFORNIA 74
VI THE OUTLAW OF THE MOUNTAINS 98
VII HENRY PLUMMER 105
VIII BOONE HELM 127
IX DEATH SCENES OF DESPERADOES 137
X JOSEPH A. SLADE 145
XI THE DESPERADO OF THE PLAINS 154
XII WILD BILL HICKOK 167
XIII FRONTIER WARS 187
XIV THE LINCOLN COUNTY WAR 196
XV THE STEVENS COUNTY WAR 227
XVI BIOGRAPHIES OF BAD MEN 256
XVII THE FIGHT OF BUCKSHOT ROBERTS 284
XVIII THE MAN HUNT 292
XIX BAD MEN OF TEXAS 313
XX MODERN BAD MEN 340
XXI BAD MEN OF THE INDIAN NATIONS 371
XXII DESPERADOES OF THE CITIES 393
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
Plummer's Men Holding Up the Bannack Stage (_Frontispiece_)
The Scene of Many Little Wars 12
Types of Border Barricades 36
The Scene of Many Hangings 138
How the Rustler Worked 164
Wild Bill Hickok's Desperate Fight 172
John Simpson Chisum 198
Men Prominent in the Lincoln County War 218
The "Women in the Case" 222
The McSween Store and Bank 240
Billy the Kid 258
"The Next Instant He Fired and Shot Ollinger Dead" 272
Pat F. Garrett 294
A Typical Western Man-Hunt 302
The Old Chisum Ranch 330
The Old Fritz Ranch 358
A Border Fortress 358
"Afterward" 398
Chapter I
The Desperado--_Analysis of His Make-up_--_How the Desperado Got to Be
Bad and Why_--_Some Men Naturally Skillful with Weapons_--_Typical
Desperadoes_.
Energy and action may be of two sorts, good or bad; this being as well
as we can phrase it in human affairs. The live wires that net our
streets are more dangerous than all the bad men the country ever knew,
but we call electricity on the whole good in its action. We lay it under
law, but sometimes it breaks out and has its own way. These outbreaks
will occur until the end of time, in live wires and vital men. Each land
in the world produces its own men individually bad--and, in time, other
bad men who kill them for the general good.
There are bad Chinamen, bad Filipinos, bad Mexicans, and Indians, and
negroes, and bad white men. The white bad man is the worst bad man of
the world, and the prize-taking bad man of the lot is the Western white
bad man. Turn the white man loose in a land free of restraint--such as
was always that Golden Fleece land, vague, shifting and transitory,
known as the American West--and he simply reverts to the ways of
Teutonic and Gothic forests. The civilized empire of the West has grown
in spite of this, because of that other strange germ, the love of law,
anciently implanted in the soul of the Anglo-Saxon. That there was
little difference between the bad man and the good man who went out
after him was frequently demonstrated in the early roaring days of the
West. The religion of progress and civilization meant very little to the
Western town marshal, who sometimes, or often, was a peace officer
chiefly because he was a good fighting man.
We band together and "elect" political representatives who do not
represent us at all. We "elect" executive officers who execute nothing
but their own wishes. We pay innumerable policemen to take from our
shoulders the burden of self-protection; and the policemen do not do
this thing. Back of all the law is the undelegated personal right, that
vague thing which, none the less, is recognized in all the laws and
charters of the world; as England and France of old, and Russia to-day,
may show. This undelegated personal right is in each of us, or ought to
be. If there is in you no hot blood to break into flame and set you
arbiter for yourself in some sharp, crucial moment, then God pity you,
for no woman ever loved you if she could find anything else to love, and
you are fit neither as man nor citizen.
As the individual retains an undelegated right, so does the body social.
We employ politicians, but at heart most of us despise politicians and
love fighting men. Society and law are not absolutely wise nor
absolutely right, but only as a compromise relatively wise and right.
The bad man, so called, may have been in large part relatively bad. This
much we may say scientifically, and without the slightest cheapness. It
does not mean that we shall waste any maudlin sentiment over a
desperado; and certainly it does not mean that we shall have anything
but contempt for the pretender at desperadoism.
Who and what was the bad man? Scientifically and historically he was
even as you and I. Whence did he come? From any and all places. What
did he look like? He came in all sorts and shapes, all colors and
sizes--just as cowards do. As to knowing him, the only way was by trying
him. His reputation, true or false, just or unjust, became, of course,
the herald of the bad man in due time. The "killer" of a Western town
might be known throughout the state or in several states. His reputation
might long outlast that of able statesmen and public benefactors.
What distinguished the bad man in peculiarity from his fellowman? Why
was he better with weapons? What is courage, in the last analysis? We
ought to be able to answer these questions in a purely scientific way.
We have machines for photographing relative quickness of thought and
muscular action. We are able to record the varying speeds of impulse
transmission in the nerves of different individuals. If you were picking
out a bad man, would you select one who, on the machine, showed a
dilatory nerve response? Hardly. The relative fitness for a man to be
"bad," to become extraordinarily quick and skillful with weapons, could,
without doubt, be predetermined largely by these scientific
measurements. Of course, having no thought-machines in the early West,
they got at the matter by experimenting, and so, very often, by a
graveyard route. You could not always stop to feel the pulse of a
suspected killer.
The use of firearms with swiftness and accuracy was necessary in the
calling of the desperado, after fate had marked him and set him apart
for the inevitable, though possibly long-deferred, end. This skill with
weapons was a natural gift in the case of nearly every man who attained
great reputation whether as killer of victims or as killer of killers.
Practice assisted in proficiency, but a Wild Bill or a Slade or a Billy
the Kid was born and not made.
Quickness in nerve action is usually backed with good digestion, and
hard life in the open is good medicine for the latter. This, however,
does not wholly cover the case. A slow man also might be a brave man.
Sooner or later, if he went into the desperado business on either side
of the game, he would fall before the man who was brave as himself and a
fraction faster with the gun.
There were unknown numbers of potential bad men who died mute and
inglorious after a life spent at a desk or a plow. They might have been
bad if matters had shaped right for that. Each war brings out its own
heroes from unsuspected places; each sudden emergency summons its own
fit man. Say that a man took to the use of weapons, and found himself
arbiter of life and death with lesser animals, and able to grant them
either at a distance. He went on, pleased with his growing skill with
firearms. He discovered that as the sword had in one age of the world
lengthened the human arm, so did the six-shooter--that epochal
instrument, invented at precisely that time of the American life when
the human arm needed lengthening--extend and strengthen his arm, and
make him and all men equal. The user of weapons felt his powers
increased. So now, in time, there came to him a moment of danger. There
was his enemy. There was the affront, the challenge. Perhaps it was male
against male, a matter of sex, prolific always in bloodshed. It might be
a matter of property, or perhaps it was some taunt as to his own
personal courage. Perhaps alcohol came into the question, as was often
the case. For one reason or the other, it came to the ordeal of combat.
It was the undelegated right of one individual against that of another.
The law was not invoked--the law would not serve. Even as the quicker
set of nerves flashed into action, the arm shot forward, and there
smote the point of flame as did once the point of steel. The victim
fell, his own weapon clutched in his hand, a fraction too late. The law
cleared the killer. It was "self-defense." "It was an even break," his
fellowmen said; although thereafter they were more reticent with him and
sought him out less frequently.
"It was an even break," said the killer to himself--"an even break, him
or me." But, perhaps, the repetition of this did not serve to blot out a
certain mental picture. I have had a bad man tell me that he killed his
second man to get rid of the mental image of his first victim.
But this exigency might arise again; indeed, most frequently did arise.
Again the embryo bad man was the quicker. His self-approbation now,
perhaps, began to grow. This was the crucial time of his life. He might
go on now and become a bad man, or he might cheapen and become an
imitation desperado. In either event, his third man left him still more
confident. His courage and his skill in weapons gave him assuredness and
ease at the time of an encounter. He was now becoming a specialist. Time
did the rest, until at length they buried him.
The bad man of genuine sort rarely looked the part assigned to him in
the popular imagination. The long-haired blusterer, adorned with a
dialect that never was spoken, serves very well in fiction about the
West, but that is not the real thing. The most dangerous man was apt to
be quiet and smooth-spoken. When an antagonist blustered and threatened,
the most dangerous man only felt rising in his own soul, keen and stern,
that strange exultation which often comes with combat for the man
naturally brave. A Western officer of established reputation once said
to me, while speaking of a recent personal difficulty into which he had
been forced: "I hadn't been in anything of that sort for years, and I
wished I was out of it. Then I said to myself, 'Is it true that you are
getting old--have you lost your nerve?' Then all at once the old feeling
came over me, and I was just like I used to be. I felt calm and happy,
and I laughed after that. I jerked my gun and shoved it into his
stomach. He put up his hands and apologized. 'I will give you a hundred
dollars now,' he said, 'if you will tell me where you got that gun.' I
suppose I was a trifle quick for him."
The virtue of the "drop" was eminently respected among bad men.
Sometimes, however, men were killed in the last desperate conviction
that no man on earth was as quick as they. What came near being an
incident of that kind was related by a noted Western sheriff.
"Down on the edge of the Pecos valley," said he, "a dozen miles below
old Fort Sumner, there used to be a little saloon, and I once captured a
man there. He came in from somewhere east of our territory, and was
wanted for murder. The reward offered for him was twelve hundred
dollars. Since he was a stranger, none of us knew him, but the sheriff's
descriptions sent in said he had a freckled face, small hands, and a red
spot in one eye. I heard that there was a new saloon-keeper in there,
and thought he might be the man, so I took a deputy and went down one
day to see about it.
"I told my deputy not to shoot until he saw me go after my gun. I didn't
want to hold the man up unless he was the right one, and I wanted to be
sure about that identification mark in the eye. Now, when a bartender is
waiting on you, he will never look you in the face until just as you
raise your glass to drink. I told my deputy that we would order a couple
of drinks, and so get a chance to look this fellow in the eye. When he
looked up, I did look him in the eye, and there was the red spot!
"I dropped my glass and jerked my gun and covered him, but he just
wouldn't put up his hands for a while. I didn't want to kill him, but I
thought I surely would have to. He kept both of his hands resting on the
bar, and I knew he had a gun within three feet of him somewhere. At last
slowly he gave in. I treated him well, as I always did a prisoner, told
him we would square it if we had made any mistake. We put irons on him
and started for Las Vegas with him in a wagon. The next morning, out on
the trail, he confessed everything to me. We turned him over, and later
he was tried and hung. I always considered him to be a pretty bad man.
So far as the result was concerned, he might about as well have gone
after his gun. I certainly thought that was what he was going to do. He
had sand. I could just see him stand there and balance the chances in
his mind.
"Another of the nerviest men I ever ran up against," the same officer
went on, reflectively, "I met when I was sheriff of Dona Aña county, New
Mexico. I was in Las Cruces, when there came in a sheriff from over in
the Indian Nations looking for a fugitive who had broken out of a
penitentiary after killing a guard and another man or so. This sheriff
told me that the criminal in question was the most desperate man he had
ever known, and that no matter how we came on him, he would put up a
fight and we would have to kill him before we could take him. We located
our man, who was cooking on a ranch six or eight miles out of town. I
told the sheriff to stay in town, because the man would know him and
would not know us. I had a Mexican deputy along with me.
"I put out my deputy on one side of the house and went in. I found my
man just wiping his hands on a towel after washing his dishes. I threw
down on him, and he answered by smashing me in the face, and then
jumping through the window like a squirrel. I caught at him and tore the
shirt off his back, but I didn't stop him. Then I ran out of the door
and caught him on the porch. I did not want to kill him, so I struck him
over the head with the handcuffs I had ready for him. He dropped, but
came up like a flash, and struck me so hard with his fist that I was
badly jarred. We fought hammer and tongs for a while, but at length he
broke away, sprang through the door, and ran down the hall. He was going
to his room after his gun. At that moment my Mexican came in, and having
no sentiment about it, just whaled away and shot him in the back,
killing him on the spot. The doctors said when they examined this man's
body that he was the most perfect physical specimen they had ever seen.
I can testify that he was a fighter. The sheriff offered me the reward,
but I wouldn't take any of it. I told him that I would be over in his
country some time, and that I was sure he would do as much for me if I
needed his help. I hope that if I do have to go after his particular
sort of bad people, I'll be lucky in getting the first start on my man.
That man was as desperate a fighter as I ever saw or expect to see. Give
a man of that stripe any kind of a show and he's going to kill you,
that's all. He knows that he has no chance under the law.
"Sometimes they got away with desperate chances, too, as many a peace
officer has learned to his cost. The only way to go after such a man is
to go prepared, and then to give him no earthly show to get the best of
you. I don't mean that an officer ought to shoot down a man if he has a
show to take his prisoner alive; but I do mean that he ought to remember
that he may be pitted against a man who is just as brave as he is,
and just as good with a gun, and who is fighting for his life."
[Illustration: THE SCENE OF MANY LITTLE WARS
More men have been killed in this street than in any other in America]
Of course, such a man as this, whether confronted by an officer of the
law or by another man against whom he has a personal grudge, or who has
in any way challenged him to the ordeal of weapons, was steadfast in his
own belief that he was as brave as any, and as quick with weapons. Thus,
until at length he met his master in the law of human progress and
civilization, he simply added to his own list of victims, or was added
to the list of another of his own sort. For a very long time, moreover,
there existed a great region on the frontier where the law could not
protect. There was good reason, therefore, for a man's learning to
depend upon his own courage and strength and skill. He had nothing else
to protect him, whether he was good or bad. In the typical days of the
Western bad man, life was the property of the individual, and not of
society, and one man placed his life against another's as the only way
of solving hard personal problems. Those days and those conditions
brought out some of the boldest and most reckless men the earth ever
saw. Before we freely criticize them, we ought fully to understand them.
Chapter II
The Imitation Desperado--_The Cheap "Long-Hair"_--_A Desperado in
Appearance, a Coward at Heart_--_Some Desperadoes Who Did Not "Stand the
Acid."_
The counterfeit bad man, in so far as he has a place in literature, was
largely produced by Western consumptives for Eastern consumption.
Sometimes he was in person manufactured in the East and sent West. It is
easy to see the philosophical difference between the actual bad man of
the West and the imitation article. The bad man was an evolution; the
imitation bad man was an instantaneous creation, a supply arising full
panoplied to fill a popular demand. Silently there arose, partly in the
West and partly in the East, men who gravely and calmly proceeded to
look the part. After looking the part for a time, to their own
satisfaction at least, and after taking themselves seriously as
befitted the situation, they, in very many instances, faded away and
disappeared in that Nowhere whence they came. Some of them took
themselves too seriously for their own good. Of course, there existed
for some years certain possibilities that any one of these bad men might
run against the real thing.
There always existed in the real, sober, level-headed West a contempt
for the West-struck man who was not really bad, but who wanted to seem
"bad." Singularly enough, men of this type were not so frequently local
products as immigrants. The "bootblack bad man" was a character
recognized on the frontier--the city tough gone West with ambitions to
achieve a bad eminence. Some of these men were partially bad for a
while. Some of them, no doubt, even left behind them, after their sudden
funerals, the impression that they had been wholly bad. You cannot
detect all the counterfeit currency in the world, severe as the test for
counterfeits was in the old West. There is, of course, no great amount
of difference between the West and the East. All America, as well as the
West, demanded of its citizens nothing so much as genuineness. Yet the
Western phrase, to "stand the acid," was not surpassed in graphic
descriptiveness. When an imitation bad man came into a town of the old
frontier, he had to "stand the acid" or get out. His hand would be
called by some one. "My friend," said old Bob Bobo, the famous
Mississippi bear hunter, to a man who was doing some pretty loud
talking, "I have always noticed that when a man goes out hunting for
trouble in these bottoms, he almost always finds it." Two weeks later,
this same loud talker threatened a calm man in simple jeans pants, who
took a shotgun and slew him impulsively. Now, the West got its hot blood
largely from the South, and the dogma of the Southern town was the same
in the Western mining town or cow camp--the bad man or the would-be bad
man had to declare himself before long, and the acid bottle was always
close at hand.
That there were grades in counterfeit bad men was accepted as a truth on
the frontier. A man might be known as dangerous, as a murderer at heart,
and yet be despised. The imitation bad man discovered that it is
comparatively easy to terrify a good part of the population of a
community. Sometimes a base imitation of a desperado is exalted in the
public eye as the real article. A few years ago four misled hoodlums of
Chicago held up a street-car barn, killed two men, stole a sum of money,
killed a policeman and another man, and took refuge in a dugout in the
sand hills below the city, comporting themselves according to the most
accepted dime-novel standards. Clumsily arrested by one hundred men or
so, instead of being tidily killed by three or four, as would have been
the case on the frontier, they were put in jail, given columns of
newspaper notice, and worshiped by large crowds of maudlin individuals.
These men probably died in the belief that they were "bad." They were
not bad men, but imitations, counterfeit, and, indeed, nothing more than
cheap and dirty little murderers.
Of course, we all feel able to detect the mere notoriety hunter, who
poses about in cheap pretentiousness; but now and then in the West there
turned up something more difficult to understand. Perhaps the most
typical case of imitation bad man ever known, at least in the Southwest,
was Bob Ollinger, who was killed by Billy the Kid in 1881, when the
latter escaped from jail at Lincoln, New Mexico. That Ollinger was a
killer had been proved beyond the possibility of a doubt. He had no
respect for human life, and those who knew him best knew that he was a
murderer at heart. His reputation was gained otherwise than through the
severe test of an "even break." Some say that he killed Chavez, a
Mexican, as he offered his own hand in greeting. He killed another man,
Hill, in a similarly treacherous way. Later, when, as a peace officer,
he was with a deputy, Pierce, serving a warrant on one Jones, he pulled
his gun and, without need or provocation, shot Jones through. The same
bullet, passing through Jones's body, struck Pierce in the leg and left
him a cripple for life. Again, Ollinger was out as a deputy with a noted
sheriff in pursuit of a Mexican criminal, who had taken refuge in a
ditch. Ollinger wanted only to get into a position where he could shoot
the man, but his superior officer crawled alone up the ditch, and,
rising suddenly, covered his man and ordered him to surrender. The
Mexican threw down his gun and said that he would surrender to the
sheriff, but that he was sure Ollinger would kill him. This fear was
justified. "When I brought out the man," said the sheriff, "Ollinger
came up on the run, with his cocked six-shooter in his hand. His long
hair was flying behind him as he ran, and I never in my life saw so
devilish a look on any human being's face. He simply wanted to shoot
that Mexican, and he chased him around me until I had to tell him I
would kill him if he did not stop." "Ollinger was a born murderer at
heart," the sheriff added later. "I never slept out with him that I did
not watch him. After I had more of a reputation, I think Ollinger would
have been glad to kill me for the notoriety of it. I never gave him a
chance to shoot me in the back or when I was asleep. Of course, you will
understand that we had to use for deputies such material as we could
get."
Ollinger was the sort of imitation desperado that looks the part. He
wore his hair long and affected the ultra-Western dress, which to-day is
despised in the West. He was one of the very few men at that
time--twenty-five years ago--who carried a knife at his belt. When he
was in such a town as Las Vegas or Sante Fé, he delighted to put on a
buckskin shirt, spread his hair out on his shoulders, and to walk
through the streets, picking his teeth with his knife, or once in a
while throwing it in such a way that it would stick up in a tree or a
board. He presented an eye-filling spectacle, and was indeed the ideal
imitation bad man. This being the case, there may be interest in
following out his life to its close, and in noting how the bearing of
the bad man's title sometimes exacted a very high price of the claimant.
Ollinger, who had made many threats against Billy the Kid, was very
cordially hated by the latter. Together with Deputy Bell, of White Oaks,
Ollinger had been appointed to guard the Kid for two weeks previous to
the execution of the death sentence which had been imposed upon the
latter. The Kid did not want to harm Bell, but he dearly hated Ollinger,
who never had lost an opportunity to taunt him. Watching his chance, the
Kid at length killed both Bell and Ollinger, shooting the latter with
Ollinger's own shotgun, with which Ollinger had often menaced his
prisoner.
Other than these two men, the Kid and Ollinger, I know of no better
types each of his own class. One was a genuine bad man, and the other
was the genuine imitation of a bad man. They were really as far apart as
the poles, and they are so held in the tradition of that bloody country
to-day. Throughout the West there are two sorts of wolves--the coyote
and the gray wolf. Either will kill, and both are lovers of blood. One
is yellow at heart, and the other is game all the way through. In
outward appearance both are wolves, and in appearance they sometimes
grade toward each other so closely that it is hard to determine the
species. The gray wolf is a warrior and is respected. The coyote is a
sneak and a murderer, and his name is a term of reproach throughout the
West.
Chapter III
The Land of the Desperado--_The Frontier of the Old West_--_The Great
Unsettled Regions_--_The Desperado of the Mountains_--_His Brother of
the Plains_--_The Desperado of the Early Railroad Towns_.
There was once a vast empire, almost unknown, west of the Missouri
river. The white civilization of this continent was three hundred years
in reaching it. We had won our independence and taken our place among
the nations of the world before our hardiest men had learned anything
whatever of this Western empire. We had bought this vast region and were
paying for it before we knew what we had purchased. The wise men of the
East, leading men in Congress, said that it would be criminal to add
this territory to our already huge domain, because it could never be
settled. It was not dreamed that civilization would ever really subdue
it. Even much later, men as able as Daniel Webster deplored the attempt
to extend our lines farther to the West, saying that these territories
could not be States, that the East would suffer if we widened our West,
and that the latter could never be of value to the union! So far as this
great West was concerned, it was spurned and held in contempt, and it
had full right to take itself as an outcast. Decreed to the wilderness
forever, it could have been forgiven for running wild. Denominated as
unfit for the occupation of the Eastern population, it might have been
expected that it would gather to itself a population all its own.
It did gather such a population, and in part that population was a
lawless one. The frontier, clear across to the Pacific, has at one time
or another been lawless; but this was not always the fault of the men
who occupied the frontier. The latter swept Westward with such
unexampled swiftness that the machinery of the law could not always keep
up with them. Where there are no courts, where each man is judge and
jury for himself, protecting himself and his property by his own arm
alone, there always have gathered also the lawless, those who do not
wish the day of law to come, men who want license and not liberty, who
wish crime and not lawfulness, who want to take what is not theirs and
to enforce their own will in their own fashion.
"There are two states of society perhaps equally bad for the promotion
of good morals and virtue--the densely populated city and the
wilderness. In the former, a single individual loses his identity in the
mass, and, being unnoticed, is without the view of the public, and can,
to a certain extent, commit crimes with impunity. In the latter, the
population is sparse and, the strong arm of the law not being extended,
his crimes are in a measure unobserved, or, if so, frequently power is
wanting to bring him to justice. Hence, both are the resort of
desperadoes. In the early settlement of the West, the borders were
infested with desperadoes flying from justice, suspected or convicted
felons escaped from the grasp of the law, who sought safety. The
counterfeiter and the robber there found a secure retreat or a new
theater for crime."
The foregoing words were written in 1855 by a historian to whom the West
of the trans-Missouri remained still a sealed book; but they cover very
fitly the appeal of a wild and unknown land to a bold, a criminal, or
an adventurous population. Of the trans-Missouri as we of to-day think
of it, no one can write more accurately and understandingly than
Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States, who thus describes
the land he knew and loved.[A]
[Footnote A: "The Wilderness Hunters." G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York and
London.]
"Some distance beyond the Mississippi, stretching from Texas to
North Dakota, and westward to the Rocky mountains, lies the plains
country. This is a region of light rainfall, where the ground is
clad with short grass, while cottonwood trees fringe the courses of
the winding plains streams; streams that are alternately turbid
torrents and mere dwindling threads of water. The great stretches
of natural pasture are broken by gray sage-brush plains, and tracts
of strangely shaped and colored Bad Lands; sun-scorched wastes in
summer, and in winter arctic in their iron desolation. Beyond the
plains rise the Rocky mountains, their flanks covered with
coniferous woods; but the trees are small, and do not ordinarily
grow very close together. Toward the north the forest becomes
denser, and the peaks higher; and glaciers creep down toward the
valleys from the fields of everlasting snow. The brooks are
brawling, trout-filled torrents; the swift rivers roam over rapid
and cataract, on their way to one or other of the two great oceans.
"Southwest of the Rockies evil and terrible deserts stretch for
leagues and leagues, mere waterless wastes of sandy plain and
barren mountain, broken here and there by narrow strips of fertile
ground. Rain rarely falls, and there are no clouds to dim the
brazen sun. The rivers run in deep canyons, or are swallowed by the
burning sand; the smaller watercourses are dry throughout the
greater part of the year.
"Beyond this desert region rise the sunny Sierras of California,
with their flower-clad slopes and groves of giant trees; and north
of them, along the coast, the rain-shrouded mountain chains of
Oregon and Washington, matted with the towering growth of the
mighty evergreen forest."
Such, then, was this Western land, so long the home of the out-dweller
who foreran civilization, and who sometimes took matters of the law into
his own hands. For purposes of convenience, we may classify him as the
bad man of the mountains and the bad man of the plains; because he was
usually found in and around the crude localities where raw resources in
property were being developed; and because, previous to the advent of
agriculture, the two vast wilderness resources were minerals and cattle.
The mines of California and the Rockies; the cattle of the great
plains--write the story of these and you have much of the story of
Western desperadoism. For, in spite of the fact that the ideal desperado
was one who did not rob or kill for gain, the most usual form of early
desperadoism had to do with attempts at unlawfully acquiring another
man's property.
The discovery of gold in California caused a flood of bold men, good and
bad, to pour into that remote region from all corners of the earth.
Books could be written, and have been written, on the days of terror in
California, when the Vigilantes took the law into their own hands. There
came the time later when the rich placers of Montana and other
territories were pouring out a stream of gold rivaling that of the days
of '49; and when a tide of restless and reckless characters, resigning
or escaping from both armies in the Civil War, mingled with many others
who heard also the imperious call of a land of gold, and rolled
westward across the plains by every means of conveyance or locomotion
then possible to man.
The next great days of the wild West were the cattle days, which also
reached their height soon after the end of the great war, when the North
was seeking new lands for its young men, and the Southwest was hunting
an outlet for the cattle herds, which had enormously multiplied while
their owners were off at the wars. The cattle country had been passed
over unnoticed by the mining men for many years, and dismissed as the
Great American Desert, as it had been named by the first explorers, who
were almost as ignorant about the West as Daniel Webster himself. Into
this once barren land, a vast region unsettled and without law, there
now came pouring up the great herds of cattle from the South, in charge
of men wild as the horned kine they drove. Here was another great wild
land that drew, as a magnet, wild men from all parts of the country.
This last home of the bad man, the old cattle range, is covered by a
passage from an earlier work:[B]
"The braiding of a hundred minor pathways, the Long Trail lay like
a vast rope connecting the cattle country of the South with that of
the North. Lying loose or coiling, it ran for more than two
thousand miles along the eastern ridge of the Rocky mountains,
sometimes close in at their feet, again hundreds of miles away
across the hard table-lands or the well-flowered prairies. It
traversed in a fair line the vast land of Texas, curled over the
Indian Nations, over Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming and
Montana, and bent in wide overlapping circles as far west as Utah
and Nevada; as far east as Missouri, Iowa, Illinois; and as far
north as the British possessions. Even to-day you may trace plainly
its former course, from its faint beginnings in the lazy land of
Mexico, the Ararat of the cattle range. It is distinct across
Texas, and multifold still in the Indian lands. Its many
intermingling paths still scar the iron surface of the Neutral
Strip, and the plows have not buried all the old furrows in the
plains of Kansas. Parts of the path still remain visible in the
mountain lands of the far North. You may see the ribbons banding
the hillsides to-day along the valley of the Stillwater, and along
the Yellowstone and toward the source of the Missouri. The hoof
marks are beyond the Musselshell, over the Bad Lands and the
_coulees_ and the flat prairies; and far up into the land of the
long cold you may see, even to-day if you like, the shadow of that
unparalleled pathway, the Long Trail of the cattle range. History
has no other like it.
"This was really the dawning of the American cattle industry. The
Long Trail now received a gradual but unmistakable extension,
always to the north, and along the line of the intermingling of the
products of the Spanish and the Anglo-Saxon civilizations. The
thrust was always to the north. Chips and flakes of the great
Southwestern herd began to be seen in the northern states. Meantime
the Anglo-Saxon civilization was rolling swiftly toward the upper
West. The Indians were being driven from the plains. A solid army
was pressing behind the vanguard of soldier, scout and plainsman.
The railroads were pushing out into a new and untracked empire. In
1871 over six hundred thousand cattle crossed the Red river for the
Northern markets. Abilene, Newton, Wichita, Ellsworth, Great Bend,
"Dodge," flared out into a swift and sometime evil blossoming. The
Long Trail, which long ago had found the black corn lands of
Illinois and Missouri, now crowded to the West, until it had
reached Utah and Nevada, and penetrated every open park and _mesa_
and valley of Colorado, and found all the high plains of Wyoming.
Cheyenne and Laramie became common words now, and drovers spoke
wisely of the dangers of the Platte as a year before they had
mentioned those of the Red river or the Arkansas. Nor did the Trail
pause in its irresistible push to the north until it had found the
last of the five great trans-continental lines, far in the British
provinces. The Long Trail of the cattle range was done. By magic
the cattle industry had spread over the entire West."
[Footnote B: "The Story of the Cowboy," by E. Hough. D. Appleton & Co.,
New York.]
By magic, also, the cattle industry called to itself a population unique
and peculiar. Here were great values to be handled and guarded. The
cowboy appeared, summoned out of the shadows by the demand of evolution.
With him appeared also the cattle thief, making his living on free beef,
as he had once on the free buffalo of the plains. The immense domain of
the West was filled with property held under no better or more obvious
mark than the imprint of a hot iron on the hide. There were no fences.
The owner might be a thousand miles away. The temptation to theft was
continual and urgent. It seemed easy and natural to take a living from
these great herds which no one seemed to own or to care for. The
"rustler" of the range made his appearance, bold, hardy, unprincipled;
and the story of his undoing by the law is precisely that of the finish
of the robbers of the mines by the Vigilantes.
Now, too, came the days of transition, which have utterly changed all
the West. The railroad sprang across this great middle country of the
plains. The intent was to connect the two sides of this continent; but,
incidentally, and more swiftly than was planned, there was builded a
great midway empire on the plains, now one of the grandest portions of
America.
This building of the trans-continental lines was a rude and dangerous
work. It took out into the West mobs of hard characters, not afraid of
hard work and hard living. These men would have a certain amount of
money as wages, and would assuredly spend these wages as they made them;
hence, the gambler followed the rough settlements at the "head of the
rails." The murderer, the thief, the prostitute, the social outcast and
the fleeing criminal went with the gamblers and the toughs. Those were
the days when it was not polite to ask a man what his name had been
back in the States. A very large percentage of this population was wild
and lawless, and it impressed those who joined it instead of being
altered and improved by them. There were no wilder days in the West than
those of the early railroad building. Such towns as Newton, Kansas,
where eleven men were killed in one night; Fort Dodge, where armed
encounters among cowboys and gamblers, deputies and desperadoes, were
too frequent to attract attention; Caldwell, on the Indian border; Hays
City, Abilene, Ellsworth--any of a dozen cow camps, where the head of
the rails caught the great northern cattle drives, furnished chapters
lurid enough to take volumes in telling--indeed, perhaps, gave that
stamp to the West which has been apparently so ineradicable.
These were flourishing times for the Western desperado, and he became
famous, and, as it were, typical, at about this era. Perhaps this was
due in part to the fact that the railroads carried with them the
telegraph and the newspaper, so that records and reports were made of
what had for many years gone unreported. Now, too, began the influx of
transients, who saw the wild West hurriedly and wrote of it as a
strange and dangerous country. The wild citizens of California and
Montana in mining days passed almost unnoticed except in fiction. The
wild men of the middle plains now began to have a record in facts, or
partial facts, as brought to the notice of the reading public which was
seeking news of the new lands. A strange and turbulent day now drew
swiftly on.
Chapter IV
The Early Outlaw--_The Frontier of the Past Century_--_The Bad Man East
of the Mississippi River_--_The Great Western Land-Pirate, John A.
Murrell_--_The Greatest Slave Insurrection Ever Planned_.
Before passing to the review of the more modern days of wild life on the
Western frontier, we shall find it interesting to note a period less
known, but quite as wild and desperate as any of later times. Indeed, we
might also say that our own desperadoes could take lessons from their
ancestors of the past generation who lived in the forests of the
Mississippi valley.
Those were the days when the South was breaking over the Appalachians
and exploring the middle and lower West. Adventurers were dropping down
the old river roads and "traces" across Kentucky, Tennessee, and
Mississippi, into Louisiana and Texas. The flatboat and keel-boat days
of the great rivers were at their height, and the population was in
large part transient, migratory, and bold; perhaps holding a larger per
cent. of criminals than any Western population since could claim. There
were no organized systems of common carriers, no accepted roads and
highways. The great National Road, from Wheeling west across Ohio,
paused midway of Indiana. Stretching for hundreds of miles in each
direction was the wilderness, wherein man had always been obliged to
fend for himself. And, as ever, the wilderness had its own wild deeds.
Flatboats were halted and robbed; caravans of travelers were attacked;
lonely wayfarers plodding on horseback were waylaid and murdered. In
short, the story of that early day shows our first frontiersman no
novice in crime.
About twenty miles below the mouth of the Wabash river, there was a
resort of robbers such as might belong to the most lurid dime-novel
list--the famous Cave-in-the-Rock, in the bank of the Ohio river. This
cavern was about twenty-five feet in height at its visible opening, and
it ran back into the bluff two hundred feet, with a width of eighty
feet. The floor of this natural cavern was fairly flat, so that it
could be used as a habitation. From this lower cave a sort of aperture
led up to a second one, immediately above it in the bluff wall, and
these two natural retreats of wild animals offered attractions to wild
men which were not unaccepted. It was here that there dwelt for some
time the famous robber Meason, or Mason, who terrorized the flatboat
trade of the Ohio at about 1800. Meason was a robber king, a giant in
stature, and a man of no ordinary brains. He had associated with him his
two sons and a few other hard characters, who together made a band
sufficiently strong to attack any party of the size usually making up
the boat companies of that time, or the average family traveling,
mounted or on foot, through the forest-covered country of the Ohio
valley. Meason killed and pillaged pretty much as he liked for a term of
years, but as travel became too general along the Ohio, he removed to
the wilder country south of that stream, and began to operate on the old
"Natchez and Nashville Trace," one of the roadways of the South at that
time, when the Indian lands were just opening to the early settlers.
Lower Tennessee and pretty much all of Mississippi made his
stamping-grounds, and his name became a terror there, as it had been
along the Ohio. The governor of the State of Mississippi offered a
reward for his capture, dead or alive; but for a long time he escaped
all efforts at apprehension. Treachery did the work, as it has usually
in bringing such bold and dangerous men to book. Two members of his gang
proved traitors to their chief. Seizing an opportunity they crept behind
him and drove a tomahawk into his brain. They cut off the head and took
it along as proof; but as they were displaying this at the seat of
government, the town of Washington, they themselves were recognized and
arrested, and were later tried and executed; which ended the Meason
gang, one of the early and once famous desperado bands.
[Illustration: TYPES OF BORDER BARRICADES]
From the earliest days there have been border counterfeiters of coin.
One of the first and most remarkable was the noted Sturdevant, who lived
in lower Illinois, near the Ohio river, in the first quarter of the last
century. Sturdevant was also something of a robber king, for he could at
any time wind his horn and summon to his side a hundred armed men. He
was ostensibly a steady farmer, and lived comfortably, with a good corps
of servants and tenants about him; but his ablest assistants did not
dwell so close to him. He had an army of confederates all over the
middle West and South, and issued more counterfeit money than any man
before, and probably than any man since. He always exacted a regular
price for his money--sixteen dollars for a hundred in counterfeit--and
such was the looseness of currency matters at that time that he found
many willing to take a chance in his trade. He never allowed any
confederate to pass a counterfeit bill in his own state, or in any other
way to bring himself under the surveillance of local law; and they were
all obliged to be especially circumspect in the county where they lived.
He was a very smug sort of villain, in the trade strictly for revenue,
and he was so careful that he was never caught by the law, in spite of
the fact that it was known that his farm was the source of a flood of
spurious money. He was finally "regulated" by the citizens, who arose
and made him leave the country. This was one of the early applications
of lynch law in the West. Its results were, as usual, salutary. There
was no more counterfeiting in that region.
A very noted desperado of these early days was Harpe, or Big Harpe, as
he was called, to distinguish him from his brother and associate,
Little Harpe. Big Harpe made a wide region of the Ohio valley dangerous
to travelers. The events connected with his vicious life are thus given
by that always interesting old-time chronicler, Henry Howe:
"In the fall of the year 1801 or 1802, a company consisting of two
men and three women arrived in Lincoln county, Ky., and encamped
about a mile from the present town of Stanford. The appearance of
the individuals composing this party was wild and rude in the
extreme. The one who seemed to be the leader of the band was above
the ordinary stature of men. His frame was bony and muscular, his
breast broad, his limbs gigantic. His clothing was uncouth and
shabby, his exterior weather-beaten and dirty, indicating continual
exposure to the elements, and designating him as one who dwelt far
from the habitations of men, and mingled not in the courtesies of
civilized life. His countenance was bold and ferocious, and
exceedingly repulsive, from its strongly marked expression of
villainy. His face, which was larger than ordinary, exhibited the
lines of ungovernable passion, and the complexion announced that
the ordinary feelings of the human breast were in him
extinguished. Instead of the healthy hue which indicates the social
emotions, there was a livid, unnatural redness, resembling that of
a dried and lifeless skin. His eye was fearless and steady, but it
was also artful and audacious, glaring upon the beholder with an
unpleasant fixedness and brilliancy, like that of a ravenous animal
gloating on its prey. He wore no covering on his head, and the
natural protection of thick, coarse hair, of a fiery redness,
uncombed and matted, gave evidence of long exposure to the rudest
visitations of the sunbeam and the tempest. He was armed with a
rifle, and a broad leathern belt, drawn closely around his waist,
supported a knife and a tomahawk. He seemed, in short, an outlaw,
destitute of all the nobler sympathies of human nature, and
prepared at all points of assault or defense. The other man was
smaller in size than him who lead the party, but similarly armed,
having the same suspicious exterior, and a countenance equally
fierce and sinister. The females were coarse and wretchedly
attired.
"These men stated in answer to the inquiry of the inhabitants, that
their name was Harpe, and that they were emigrants from North
Carolina. They remained at their encampment the greater part of
two days and a night, spending the time in rioting, drunkenness and
debauchery. When they left, they took the road leading to Green
river. The day succeeding their departure, a report reached the
neighborhood that a young gentleman of wealth from Virginia, named
Lankford, had been robbed and murdered on what was then called and
is still known as the "Wilderness Road," which runs through the
Rock-castle hills. Suspicion immediately fixed upon the Harpes as
the perpetrators, and Captain Ballenger at the head of a few bold
and resolute men, started in pursuit. They experienced great
difficulty in following their trail, owing to a heavy fall of snow,
which obliterated most of their tracks, but finally came upon them
while encamped in a bottom on Green river, near the spot where the
town of Liberty now stands. At first they made a show of
resistance, but upon being informed that if they did not
immediately surrender, they would be shot down, they yielded
themselves prisoners. They were brought back to Stanford, and there
examined. Among their effects were found some fine linen shirts,
marked with the initials of Lankford. One had been pierced by a
bullet and was stained with blood. They had also a considerable
sum of money in gold. It was afterward ascertained that this was
the kind of money Lankford had with him. The evidence against them
being thus conclusive, they were confined in the Stanford jail, but
were afterward sent for trial to Danville, where the district court
was in session. Here they broke jail, and succeeded in making their
escape.
"They were next heard of in Adair county, near Columbia. In passing
through the country, they met a small boy, the son of Colonel
Trabue, with a pillow-case of meal or flour, an article they
probably needed. This boy, it is supposed they robbed and then
murdered, as he was never afterward heard of. Many years afterward
human bones answering the size of Colonel Trabue's son at the time
of his disappearance, were found in a sink hole near the place
where he was said to have been murdered.
"The Harpes still shaped their course toward the mouth of Green
river, marking their path by murders and robberies of the most
horrible and brutal character. The district of country through
which they passed was at that time very thinly settled, and from
this reason, their outrages went unpunished. They seemed inspired
with the deadliest hatred against the whole human race, and such
was their implacable misanthropy, that they were known to kill
where there was no temptation to rob. One of their victims was a
little girl, found at some distance from her home, whose tender age
and helplessness would have been protection against any but
incarnate fiends. The last dreadful act of barbarity, which led to
their punishment and expulsion from the country, exceeded in
atrocity all the others.
"Assuming the guise of Methodist preachers, they obtained lodgings
one night at a solitary house on the road. Mr. Stagall, the master
of the house, was absent, but they found his wife and children, and
a stranger, who, like themselves, had stopped for the night. Here
they conversed and made inquiries about the two noted Harpes who
were represented as prowling about the country. When they retired
to rest, they contrived to secure an axe, which they carried with
them into their chamber. In the dead of night, they crept softly
down stairs, and assassinated the whole family, together with the
stranger, in their sleep, and then setting fire to the house, made
their escape. When Stagall returned, he found no wife to welcome
him; no home to receive him. Distracted with grief and rage, he
turned his horse's head from the smoldering ruins, and repaired to
the house of Captain John Leeper. Leeper was one of the most
powerful men in his day, and fearless as powerful. Collecting four
or five men well armed, they mounted and started in pursuit of
vengeance. It was agreed that Leeper should attack 'Big Harpe,'
leaving 'Little Harpe' to be disposed of by Stagall. The others
were to hold themselves in readiness to assist Leeper and Stagall,
as circumstances might require.
"This party found the women belonging to the Harpes, attending to
their little camp by the roadside; the men having gone aside into
the woods to shoot an unfortunate traveler, of the name of Smith,
who had fallen into their hands, and whom the women had begged
might not be dispatched before their eyes. It was this halt that
enabled the pursuers to overtake them. The women immediately gave
the alarm, and the miscreants mounting their horses, which were
large, fleet and powerful, fled in separate directions. Leeper
singled out the 'Big Harpe,' and being better mounted than his
companions, soon left them far behind. 'Little Harpe' succeeded in
escaping from Stagall, and he, with the rest of his companions,
turned and followed on the track of Leeper and the 'Big Harpe.'
After a chase of about nine miles, Leeper came within gun-shot of
the latter and fired. The ball entering his thigh, passed through
it and penetrated his horse and both fell. Harpe's gun escaped from
his hand and rolled some eight or ten feet down the bank. Reloading
his rifle, Leeper ran to where the wounded outlaw lay weltering in
his blood, and found him with one thigh broken, and the other
crushed beneath his horse. Leeper rolled the horse away, and set
Harpe in an easier position. The robber begged that he might not be
killed. Leeper told him that he had nothing to fear from him, but
that Stagall was coming up, and could not probably be restrained.
Harpe appeared very much frightened at hearing this, and implored
Leeper to protect him. In a few moments, Stagall appeared, and
without uttering a word, raised his rifle and shot Harpe through
the head. They then severed the head from the body, and stuck it
upon a pole where the road crosses the creek, from which the place
was then named and is yet called Harpe's Head. Thus perished one of
the boldest and most noted freebooters that has ever appeared in
America. Save courage, he was without one redeeming quality, and
his death freed the country from a terror which had long paralyzed
its boldest spirits.
"The 'Little Harpe' afterward joined the band of Meason, and became
one of his most valuable assistants in the dreadful trade of
robbery and murder. He was one of the two bandits that, tempted by
the reward for their leader's head, murdered him, and eventually
themselves suffered the penalty of the law as previously related."
Thus it would seem that the first quarter of the last century on the
frontier was not without its own interest. The next decade, or that
ending about 1840, however, offered a still greater instance of
outlawry, one of the most famous ones indeed of American history,
although little known to-day. This had to do with that genius in crime,
John A. Murrell, long known as the great Western land-pirate; and surely
no pirate of the seas was ever more enterprising or more dangerous.
Murrell was another man who, in a decent walk of life, would have been
called great. He had more than ordinary energy and intellect. He was not
a mere brute, but a shrewd, cunning, scheming man, hesitating at no
crime on earth, yet animated by a mind so bold that mere personal crime
was not enough for him. When it is added that he had a gang of robbers
and murderers associated with him who were said to number nearly two
thousand men, and who were scattered over the entire South below the
Ohio river, it may be seen how bold were his plans; and his ability may
further be shown in the fact that for years these men lived among and
mingled with their fellows in civil life, unknown and unsuspected. Some
of them were said to have been of the best families of the land; and
even yet there come to light strange and romantic tales, perhaps not
wholly true, of death-bed confessions of men prominent in the South who
admitted that once they belonged to Murrell's gang, but had later
repented and reformed. A prominent Kentucky lawyer was one of these.
Murrell and his confederates would steal horses and mules, or at least
the common class, or division, known as the "strikers," would do so,
although the members of the Grand Council would hardly stoop to so petty
a crime. For them was reserved the murdering of travelers or settlers
who were supposed to have money, and the larger operations of negro
stealing.
The theft of slaves, the claiming of the runaway rewards, the later
re-stealing and re-selling and final killing of the negro in order to
destroy the evidence, are matters which Murrell reduced to a system that
has no parallel in the criminal records of the country. But not even
here did this daring outlaw pause. It was not enough to steal a negro
here and there, and to make a few thousand dollars out of each negro so
handled. The whole state of organized society was to be overthrown by
means of this same black population. So at least goes one story of his
life. We know of several so-called black insurrections that were planned
at one time or another in the South--as, for instance, the Turner
insurrection in Virginia; but this Murrell enterprise was the biggest of
them all.
The plan was to have the uprising occur all over the South on the same
day, Christmas of 1835. The blacks were to band together and march on
the settlements, after killing all the whites on the farms where they
worked. There they were to fall under the leadership of Murrell's
lieutenants, who were to show them how to sack the stores, to kill the
white merchants, and take the white women. The banks of all the Southern
towns were to become the property of Murrell and his associates. In
short, at one stroke, the entire system of government, which had been
established after such hard effort in that fierce wilderness along the
old Southern "traces," was to be wiped out absolutely. The land was
indeed to be left without law. The entire fruits of organized society
were to belong to a band of outlaws. This was probably the best and
boldest instance ever seen of the narrowness of the line dividing
society and savagery.
Murrell was finally brought to book by his supposed confederate, Virgil
A. Stewart, the spy, who went under the name of Hues, whose evidence,
after many difficulties, no doubt resulted in the breaking up of this,
the largest and most dangerous band of outlaws this country ever saw;
although Stewart himself was a vain and ambitious notoriety seeker.
Supposing himself safe, Murrell gave Stewart a detailed story of his
life. This was later used in evidence against him; and although
Stewart's account needs qualification, it is the best and fullest record
obtainable to-day.[C]
[Footnote C: "Life and Adventures of Virgil A. Stewart." Harper and
Brothers, New York. 1836.]
"I was born in Middle Tennessee," Murrell personally stated. "My
parents had not much property, but they were intelligent people; and my
father was an honest man I expect, and tried to raise me honest, but I
think none the better of him for that. My mother was of the pure grit;
she learned me and all her children to steal as soon as we could walk
and would hide for us whenever she could. At ten years old I was not a
bad hand. The first good haul I made was from a pedler who lodged at my
father's house one night.
"I began to look after larger spoils and ran several fine horses. By the
time I was twenty I began to acquire considerable character, and
concluded to go off and do my speculation where I was not known, and go
on a larger scale; so I began to see the value of having friends in this
business. I made several associates; I had been acquainted with some old
hands for a long time, who had given me the names of some royal fellows
between Nashville and Tuscaloosa, and between Nashville and Savannah in
the state of Georgia and many other places. Myself and a fellow by the
name of Crenshaw gathered four good horses and started for Georgia. We
got in company with a young South Carolinian just before we reached
Cumberland Mountain, and Crenshaw soon knew all about his business. He
had been to Tennessee to buy a drove of hogs, but when he got there pork
was dearer than he calculated, and he declined purchasing. We concluded
he was a prize. Crenshaw winked at me; I understood his idea. Crenshaw
had traveled the road before, but I never had; we had traveled several
miles on the mountain, when we passed near a great precipice; just
before we passed it, Crenshaw asked me for my whip, which had a pound of
lead in the butt; I handed it to him, and he rode up by the side of the
South Carolinian, and gave him a blow on the side of the head, and
tumbled him from his horse; we lit from our horses and fingered his
pockets; we got twelve hundred and sixty-two dollars. Crenshaw said he
knew of a place to hide him, and gathered him under the arms, and I by
his feet, and conveyed him to a deep crevice in the brow of the
precipice, and tumbled him into it; he went out of sight. We then
tumbled in his saddle, and took his horse with us, which was worth two
hundred dollars. We turned our course for South Alabama, and sold our
horse for a good price. We frolicked for a week or more and were the
highest larks you ever saw. We commenced sporting and gambling, and
lost every cent of our money.
"We were forced to resort to our profession for a second raise. We stole
a negro man, and pushed for Mississippi. We had promised him that we
would conduct him to a free state if he would let us sell him once as we
went on our way; we also agreed to give him part of the money. We sold
him for six hundred dollars; but, when we went to start, the negro
seemed to be very uneasy, and appeared to doubt our coming back for him
as we had promised. We lay in a creek bottom, not far from the place
where we had sold the negro, all the next day, and after dark we went to
the china-tree in the lane where we were to meet Tom; he had been
waiting for some time. He mounted his horse, and we pushed with him a
second time. We rode twenty miles that night to the house of a friendly
speculator. I had seen him in Tennessee, and had given him several
lifts. He gave me his place of residence, that I might find him when I
was passing. He is quite rich, and one of the best kind of fellows. Our
horses were fed as much as they would eat, and two of them were
foundered the next morning. We were detained a few days, and during that
time our friend went to a little village in the neighborhood, and saw
the negro advertised, with a description of the two men of whom he had
been purchased, and with mention of them as suspicious personages. It
was rather squally times, but any port in a storm; we took the negro
that night to the bank of a creek which runs by the farm of our friend,
and Crenshaw shot him through the head. We took out his entrails and
sunk him in the creek; our friend furnished us with one fine horse, and
we left him our foundered horses. We made our way through the Choctaw
and Chickasaw Nations, and then to Williamson county, in this state. We
should have made a fine trip if we had taken care of all we got.
"I had become a considerable libertine, and when I returned home I spent
a few months rioting in all the luxuries of forbidden pleasures with the
girls of my acquaintance. My stock of cash was soon gone, and I put to
my shift for more. I commenced with horses, and ran several from the
adjoining counties. I had got associated with a young man who had
professed to be a preacher among the Methodists, and a sharper he was;
he was as slick on the tongue as goose-grease. I took my first lessons
in divinity from this young preacher. He was highly respected by all
who knew him, and well calculated to please; he first put me in the
notion of preaching, to aid me in my speculations.
"I got into difficulty about a mare that I had taken, and was imprisoned
for near three years. I shifted it from court to court, but was at last
found guilty, and whipped. During my confinement I read the scriptures,
and became a good judge of theology. I had not neglected the criminal
laws for many years before that time. When they turned me loose I was
prepared for anything; I wanted to kill all but those of my own grit;
and I will die by the side of one of them before I will desert.
"My next speculation was in the Choctaw region; myself and brother stole
two fine horses, and made our way into this country. We got in with an
old negro man and his wife, and three sons, to go off with us to Texas,
and promised them that, if they would work for us one year after we got
there, we would let them go free, and told them many fine stories. The
old negro became suspicious that we were going to sell him, and grew
quite contrary; so we landed one day by the side of an island, and I
requested him to go with me round the point of the island to hunt a
good place to catch some fish. After we were hidden from our company I
shot him through the head, and then ripped open his belly and tumbled
him into the river. I returned to my company, and told them that the
negro had fallen into the river, and that he never came up after he went
under. We landed fifty miles above New Orleans, and went into the
country and sold our negroes to a Frenchman for nineteen hundred
dollars.
"We went from where we sold the negroes to New Orleans, and dressed
ourselves like young lords. I mixed with the loose characters at the
_swamp_ every night. One night, as I was returning to the tavern where I
boarded, I was stopped by two armed men, who demanded my money. I handed
them my pocketbook, and observed that I was very happy to meet with
them, as we were all of the same profession. One of them observed, 'D--d
if I ever rob a brother chip. We have had our eyes on you and the man
that has generally come with you for several nights; we saw so much
rigging and glittering jewelry, that we concluded you must be some
wealthy dandy, with a surplus of cash; and had determined to rid you of
the trouble of some of it; but, if you are a robber, here is your
pocketbook, and you must go with us to-night, and we will give you an
introduction to several fine fellows of the block; but stop, do you
understand this motion?' I answered it, and thanked them for their
kindness, and turned with them. We went to old Mother Surgick's, and had
a real frolic with her girls. That night was the commencement of my
greatness in what the world calls villainy. The two fellows who robbed
me were named Haines and Phelps; they made me known to all the
speculators that visited New Orleans, and gave me the name of every
fellow who would speculate that lived on the Mississippi river, and many
of its tributary streams, from New Orleans up to all the large Western
cities.
"I had become acquainted with a Kentuckian, who boarded at the same
tavern I did, and I suspected he had a large sum of money; I felt an
inclination to count it for him before I left the city; so I made my
notions known to Phelps and my other new comrades, and concerted our
plan. I was to get him off to the _swamp_ with me on a spree, and when
we were returning to our lodgings, my friends were to meet us and rob us
both. I had got very intimate with the Kentuckian, and he thought me one
of the best fellows in the world. He was very fond of wine; and I had
him well fumed with good wine before I made the proposition for a
frolic. When I invited him to walk with me he readily accepted the
invitation. We cut a few shines with the girls, and started to the
tavern. We were met by a band of robbers, and robbed of all our money.
The Kentuckian was so mad that he cursed the whole city, and wished that
it would all be deluged in a flood of water so soon as he left the
place. I went to my friends the next morning, and got my share of the
spoil money, and my pocketbook that I had been robbed of. We got seven
hundred and fifty dollars of the bold Kentuckian, which was divided
among thirteen of us.
"I commenced traveling and making all the acquaintances among the
speculators that I could. I went from New Orleans to Cincinnati, and
from there I visited Lexington, in Kentucky. I found a speculator about
four miles from Newport, who furnished me with a fine horse the second
night after I arrived at his house. I went from Lexington to Richmond,
in Virginia, and from there I visited Charleston, in the State of South
Carolina; and from thence to Milledgeville, by the way of Savannah and
Augusta, in the State of Georgia. I made my way from Milledgeville to
Williamson county, the old stamping-ground. In all the route I only
robbed eleven men but I preached some fine sermons, and scattered some
counterfeit United States paper among my brethren.
* * * * *
"After I returned home from the first grand circuit I made among my
speculators, I remained there but a short time, as I could not rest when
my mind was not actively engaged in some speculation. I commenced the
foundation of this mystic clan on that tour, and suggested the plan of
exciting a rebellion among the negroes, as the sure road to an
inexhaustible fortune to all who would engage in the expedition. The
first mystic sign which is used by this clan was in use among robbers
before I was born; and the second had its origin from myself, Phelps,
Haines, Cooper, Doris, Bolton, Harris, Doddridge, Celly, Morris, Walton,
Depont, and one of my brothers, on the second night after my
acquaintance with them in New Orleans. We needed a higher order to carry
on our designs, and we adopted our sign, and called it the sign of the
Grand Council of the Mystic Clan; and practised ourselves to give and
receive the new sign to a fraction before we parted; and, in addition to
this improvement, we invented and formed a mode of corresponding, by
means of ten characters, mixed with other matter, which has been very
convenient on many occasions, and especially when any of us get into
difficulties. I was encouraged in my new undertaking, and my heart began
to beat high with the hope of being able one day to visit the pomp of
the Southern and Western people in my vengeance; and of seeing their
cities and towns one common scene of devastation, smoked walls and
fragments.
"I decoyed a negro man from his master in Middle Tennessee, and sent him
to Mill's Point by a young man, and I waited to see the movements of the
owner. He thought his negro had run off. So I started to take possession
of my prize. I got another friend at Mill's Point to take my negro in a
skiff, and convey him to the mouth of Red river, while I took passage on
a steamboat. I then went through the country by land, and sold my negro
for nine hundred dollars, and the second night after I sold him I stole
him again, and my friend ran him to the Irish bayou in Texas; I
followed on after him, and sold my negro in Texas for five hundred
dollars. I then resolved to visit South America, and see if there was an
opening in that country for a speculation; I had also concluded that I
could get some strong friends in that quarter to aid me in my designs
relative to a negro rebellion; but of all people in the world, the
Spaniards are the most treacherous and cowardly; I never want them
concerned in any matter with me; I had rather take the negroes in this
country to fight than a Spaniard. I stopped in a village, and passed as
a doctor, and commenced practising medicine. I could ape the doctor
first-rate, having read Ewel, and several other works on primitive
medicine. I became a great favorite of an old Catholic; he adopted me as
his son in the faith, and introduced me to all the best families as a
young doctor from North America. I had been with the old Catholic but a
very short time before I was a great Roman Catholic, and bowed to the
cross, and attended regularly to all the ceremonies of that persuasion;
and, to tell you the fact, Hues, all the Catholic religion needs to be
universally received, is to be correctly represented; but you know I
care nothing for religion. I had been with the old Catholic about three
months, and was getting a heavy practice, when an opportunity offered
for me to rob the good man's secretary of nine hundred and sixty dollars
in gold, and I could have got as much more in silver if I could have
carried it. I was soon on the road for home again; I stopped three weeks
in New Orleans as I came home, and had some high fun with old Mother
Surgick's girls.
"I collected all my associates in New Orleans at one of my friend's
houses in that place, and we sat in council three days before we got all
our plans to our notion; we then determined to undertake the rebellion
at every hazard, and make as many friends as we could for that purpose.
Every man's business being assigned him, I started for Natchez on foot.
Having sold my horse in New Orleans with the intention of stealing
another after I started, I walked four days, and no opportunity offered
for me to get a horse. The fifth day, about twelve o'clock, I had become
very tired, and stopped at a creek to get some water and rest a little.
While I was sitting on a log, looking down the road I had come, a man
came in sight riding a good-looking horse. The very moment I saw him I
determined to have his horse if he was in the garb of a traveler. He
rode up, and I saw from his equipage that he was a traveler. I arose
from my seat and drew an elegant rifle pistol on him, and ordered him to
dismount. He did so, and I took his horse by the bridle, and pointed
down the creek, and ordered him to walk before me. We went a few hundred
yards and stopped. I hitched his horse, then made him undress himself,
all to his shirt and drawers, and ordered him to turn his back to me. He
asked me if I was going to shoot him. I ordered him the second time to
turn his back to me. He said, 'If you are determined to kill me, let me
have time to pray before I die.' I told him I had no time to hear him
pray. He turned round and dropped on his knees, and I shot him through
the back of the head. I ripped open his belly, and took out his
entrails, and sunk him in the creek. I then searched his pockets, and
found four hundred and one dollars and thirty-seven cents, and a number
of papers that I did not take time to examine. I sunk the pocketbook and
papers and his hat in the creek. His boots were brand new, and fitted me
very genteelly, and I put them on, and sunk my old shoes in the creek to
atone for them. I rolled up his clothes and put them into his
portmanteau, as they were quite new cloth of the best quality. I mounted
as fine a horse as ever I straddled, and directed my course to Natchez
in much better style than I had been for the last five days.
"I reached Natchez, and spent two days with my friends at that place and
the girls under the Hill together. I then left Natchez for the Choctaw
nation, with the intention of giving some of them a chance for their
property. As I was riding along between Benton and Rankin, planning for
my designs, I was overtaken by a tall and good-looking young man, riding
an elegant horse, which was splendidly rigged off; and the young
gentleman's apparel was of the gayest that could be had, and his
watch-chain and other jewelry were of the richest and best. I was
anxious to know if he intended to travel through the Choctaw nation, and
soon managed to learn. He said he had been to the lower country with a
drove of negroes, and was returning home to Kentucky. We rode on, and
soon got very intimate for strangers, and agreed to be company through
the Indian nation. We were two fine-looking men, and, to hear us talk,
we were very rich. I felt him on the subject of speculation, but he
cursed the speculators, and said he was in a bad condition to fall into
the hands of such villains, as he had the cash with him that twenty
negroes had sold for; and that he was very happy that he happened to get
in company with me through the nation. I concluded he was a noble prize,
and longed to be counting his cash. At length we came into one of those
long stretches in the Nation, where there was no house for twenty miles,
on the third day after we had been in company with each other. The
country was high, hilly, and broken, and no water; just about the time I
reached the place where I intended to count my companion's cash, I
became very thirsty, and insisted on turning down a deep hollow, or
dale, that headed near the road, to hunt some water. We had followed
down the dale for near four hundred yards, when I drew my pistol and
shot him through. He fell dead; I commenced hunting for his cash, and
opened his large pocketbook, which was stuffed very full; and when I
began to open it I thought it was a treasure indeed; but oh! the
contents of that book! it was richly filled with the copies of
love-songs, the forms of love-letters, and some of his own
composition,--but no cash. I began to cut off his clothes with my knife,
and examine them for his money. I found four dollars and a half in
change in his pockets, and no more. And is this the amount for which
twenty negroes sold? thought I. I recollected his watch and jewelry, and
I gathered them in; his chain was rich and good, but it was swung to an
old brass watch. He was a puff for true, and I thought all such fools
ought to die as soon as possible. I took his horse, and swapped him to
an Indian native for four ponies, and sold them on the way home. I
reached home, and spent a few weeks among the girls of my acquaintance,
in all the enjoyments that money could afford.
"My next trip was through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina,
Virginia, and Maryland, and then back to South Carolina, and from there
round by Florida and Alabama. I began to conduct the progress of my
operations, and establish my emissaries over the country in every
direction.
"I have been going ever since from one place to another, directing and
managing; but I have others now as good as myself to manage. This
fellow, Phelps, that I was telling you of before, he is a noble chap
among the negroes, and he wants them all free; he knows how to excite
them as well as any person; but he will not do for a robber, as he
cannot kill a man unless he has received an injury from him first. He is
now in jail at Vicksburg, and I fear will hang. I went to see him not
long since, but he is so strictly watched that nothing can be done. He
has been in the habit of stopping men on the highway, and robbing them,
and letting them go on; but that will never do for a robber; after I rob
a man he will never give evidence against me, and there is but one safe
plan in the business, and that is to kill--if I could not afford to kill
a man, I would not rob.
"The great object that we have in contemplation is to excite a rebellion
among the negroes throughout the slave-holding states. Our plan is to
manage so as to have it commence everywhere at the same hour. We have
set on the 25th of December, 1835, for the time to commence our
operations. We design having our companies so stationed over the
country, in the vicinity of the banks and large cities, that when the
negroes commence their carnage and slaughter, we will have detachments
to fire the towns and rob the banks while all is confusion and dismay.
The rebellion taking place everywhere at the same time, every part of
the country will be engaged in its own defence; and one part of the
country can afford no relief to another, until many places will be
entirely overrun by the negroes, and our pockets replenished from the
banks and the desks of rich merchants' houses. It is true that in many
places in the slave states the negro population is not strong, and would
be easily overpowered; but, back them with a few resolute leaders from
our clan, they will murder thousands, and huddle the remainder into
large bodies of stationary defence for their own preservation; and then,
in many other places, the black population is much the strongest, and
under a leader would overrun the country before any steps could be taken
to suppress them.
"We do not go to every negro we see and tell him that the negroes intend
to rebel on the night of the 25th of December, 1835. We find the most
vicious and wickedly disposed on large farms, and poison their minds by
telling them how they are mistreated. When we are convinced that we have
found a bloodthirsty devil, we swear him to secrecy and disclose to him
the secret, and convince him that every other state and section of
country where there are any negroes intend to rebel and slay all the
whites they can on the night of the 25th of December, 1835, and assure
him that there are thousands of white men engaged in trying to free
them, who will die by their sides in battle. We have a long ceremony for
the oath, which is administered in the presence of a terrific picture
painted for that purpose, representing the monster who is to deal with
him should he prove unfaithful in the engagements he has entered into.
This picture is highly calculated to make a negro true to his trust, for
he is disposed to be superstitious at best.
"Our black emissaries have the promise of a share in the spoils we may
gain, and we promise to conduct them to Texas should we be defeated,
where they will be free; but we never talk of being defeated. We always
talk of victory and wealth to them. There is no danger in any man, if
you can ever get him once implicated or engaged in a matter. That is the
way we employ our strikers in all things; we have them implicated before
we trust them from our sight.
"This may seem too bold, but that is what I glory in. All the crimes I
have ever committed have been of the most daring; and I have been
successful in all my attempts as yet; and I am confident that I will be
victorious in this matter, as in the robberies which I have in
contemplation; and I will have the pleasure and honor of seeing and
knowing that by my management I have glutted the earth with more human
gore, and destroyed more property, than any other robber who has ever
lived in America, or the known world. I look on the American people as
my common enemy. My clan is strong, brave, and experienced, and rapidly
increasing in strength every day. I should not be surprised if we were
to be two thousand strong by the 25th of December, 1835; and, in
addition to this, I have the advantage of any other leader of banditti
that has ever preceded me, for at least one-half of my Grand Council are
men of high standing, and many of them in honorable and lucrative
offices."
The number of men, more or less prominent, in the different states
included: sixty-one from Tennessee, forty-seven from Mississippi,
forty-six from Arkansas, twenty-five from Kentucky, twenty-seven from
Missouri, twenty-eight from Alabama, thirty-three from Georgia,
thirty-five from South Carolina, thirty-two from North Carolina,
twenty-one from Virginia, twenty-seven from Maryland, sixteen from
Florida, thirty-two from Louisiana. The transient members who made a
habit of traveling from place to place numbered twenty-two; Murrell said
that there was a total list of two thousand men in his band, including
all classes.
To the foregoing sketch of Murrell's life Mr. Alexander Hynds, historian
of Tennessee, adds some facts and comments which will enable the reader
more fully to make his own estimate as to this singular man:
"The central meeting place of Murrell's band was near an enormous
cottonwood tree in Mississippi county, Arkansas. It was standing in
1890, and is perhaps still standing in the wilderness shortly above
Memphis. His widely scattered bands had a system of signs and
passwords. Murrell himself was married to the sister of one of his
gang. He bought a good farm near Denmark, Madison county,
Tennessee, where he lived as a plain farmer, while he conducted the
most fearful schemes of rapine and murder from New Orleans up to
Memphis, St. Louis and Cincinnati.
"Nature had done much for Murrell. He had a quick mind, a fine
natural address and great adaptability; and he was as much at ease
among the refined and cultured as with his own gang. He made a
special study of criminal law, and knew something of medicine. He
often palmed himself off as a preacher, and preached in large
camp-meetings--and some were converted under his ministry! He often
used his clerical garb in passing counterfeit money. With a clear
head, cool, fine judgment, and a nature utterly without fear, moral
or physical, his power over his men never waned. To them he was
just, fair and amiable. He was a kind husband and brother, and a
faithful friend. He took great pride in his position and in the
operations of his gang. This conceit was the only weak spot in his
nature, and led to his downfall.
"Stewart, who purports to be Murrell's biographer, made Murrell's
acquaintance, pretended to join his gang, and playing on his
vanity, attended a meeting of the gang at the rendezvous at the Big
Cottonwood, and saw the meeting of the Grand Council. He had
Murrell arrested, and he was tried, convicted and sent to the
Tennessee penitentiary in 1834 for ten years. There he worked in
the blacksmith shops, but by the time he got out, was broken down
in mind and body, emerging an imbecile and an invalid, to live less
than a year.
"Stewart's account holds inconsistencies and inaccuracies, such as
that many men high in social and official life belonged to
Murrell's gang, which his published lists do not show. He had
perhaps 440 to 450 men, scattered from New Orleans to Cincinnati,
but his downfall spread fear and distrust among them.
"At Vicksburg, on July 4, 1835, a drunken member of the gang
threatened to attack the authorities, and was tarred and feathered.
Others of the gang, or at least several well-known gamblers,
collected and defied the citizens, and killed the good and brave
Dr. Bodley. Five men were hung, Hullams, Dutch Bill, North, Smith
and McCall. The news swept like wildfire through the Mississippi
Valley and gave heart to the lovers of law and order. At one or two
other places some were shot, some were hanged, and now and then one
or two were sent to prison, and thus an end was put to organized
crime in the Southwest forever; and this closed out the reign of
the river cutthroats, pirates and gamblers as well."
Thus, as in the case of Sturdevant, lynch law put an effectual end to
outlawry that the law itself could not control.
Chapter V
The Vigilantes of California--_The Greatest Vigilante Movement of the
World_--_History of the California "Stranglers" and Their Methods_.
The world will never see another California. Great gold stampedes there
may be, but under conditions far different from those of 1849.
Transportation has been so developed, travel has become so swift and
easy, that no section can now long remain segregated from the rest of
the world. There is no corner of the earth which may not now be reached
with a celerity impossible in the days of the great rush to the Pacific
Coast. The whole structure of civilization, itself based upon
transportation, goes swiftly forward with that transportation, and the
tent of the miner or adventurer finds immediately erected by its side
the temple of the law.
It was not thus in those early days of our Western history. The law was
left far behind by reason of the exigencies of geography and of
wilderness travel. Thousands of honest men pressed on across the plains
and mountains inflamed, it is true, by the madness of the lust for gold,
but carrying at the outset no wish to escape from the watch-care of the
law. With them went equal numbers of those eager to escape all
restraints of society and law, men intending never to aid in the
uprearing of the social system in new wild lands. Both these elements,
the law-loving and the law-hating, as they advanced _pari-passu_ farther
and farther from the staid world which they had known, noticed the
development of a strange phenomenon: that law, which they had left
behind them, waned in importance with each passing day. The standards of
the old home changed, even as customs changed. A week's journey from the
settlements showed the argonaut a new world. A month hedged it about to
itself, alone, apart, with ideas and values of its own and independent
of all others. A year sufficed to leave that world as distinct as though
it occupied a planet all its own. For that world the divine fire of the
law must be re-discovered, evolved, nay, evoked fresh from chaos even as
the savage calls forth fire from the dry and sapless twigs of the
wilderness.
In the gold country all ideas and principles were based upon new
conditions. Precedents did not exist. Man had gone savage again, and it
was the beginning. Yet this savage, willing to live as a savage in a
land which was one vast encampment, was the Anglo-Saxon savage, and
therefore carried with him that chief trait of the American character,
the principle that what a man earns--not what he steals, but what he
earns--is his and his alone. This principle sowed in ground forbidding
and unpromising was the seed of the law out of which has sprung the
growth of a mighty civilization fit to be called an empire of its own.
The growth and development of law under such conditions offered
phenomena not recorded in the history of any other land or time.
In the first place, and even while in transit, men organized for the
purpose of self-protection, and in this necessary act law-abiding and
criminal elements united. After arriving at the scenes of the gold
fields, such organization was forgotten; even the parties that had
banded together in the Eastern states as partners rarely kept together
for a month after reaching the region where luck, hazard and
opportunity, inextricably blended, appealed to each man to act for
himself and with small reference to others. The first organizations of
the mining camps were those of the criminal element. They were presently
met by the organization of the law and order men. Hard upon the miners'
law came the regularly organized legal machinery of the older states,
modified by local conditions, and irretrievably blended with a politics
more corrupt than any known before or since. Men were busy in picking up
raw gold from the earth, and they paid small attention to courts and
government. The law became an unbridled instrument of evil. Judges of
the courts openly confiscated the property of their enemies, or
sentenced them with no reference to the principles of justice, with as
great disregard for life and liberty as was ever known in the
Revolutionary days of France. Against this manner of government
presently arose the organizations of the law-abiding, the
justice-loving, and these took the law into their own stern hands. The
executive officers of the law, the sheriffs and constables, were in
league to kill and confiscate; and against these the new agency of the
actual law made war, constituting themselves into an arm of essential
government, and openly called themselves Vigilantes. In turn criminals
used the cloak of the Vigilantes to cover their own deeds of lawlessness
and violence. The Vigilantes purged themselves of the false members, and
carried their own title of opprobrium, the "stranglers," with unconcern
or pride. They grew in numbers, the love of justice their lodestone,
until at one time they numbered more than five thousand in the city of
San Francisco alone, and held that community in a grip of lawlessness,
or law, as you shall choose to term it. They set at defiance the chief
executive of the state, erected an armed castle of their own, seized
upon the arms of the militia, defied the government of the United States
and even the United States army! They were, as you shall choose to call
them, criminals, or great and noble men. Seek as you may to-day, you
will never know the full roster of their names, although they made no
concealment of their identity; and no one, to this day, has ever been
able to determine who took the first step in their organization. They
began their labors in California at a time when there had been more than
two thousand murders--five hundred in one year--and not five legal
executions. Their task included the erection of a fit structure of the
law, and, incidentally, the destruction of a corrupt and unworthy
structure claiming the title of the law. In this strange, swift panorama
there is all the story of the social system, all the picture of the
building of that temple of the law which, as Americans, we now revere,
or, at times, still despise and desecrate.
At first the average gold seeker concerned himself little with law,
because he intended to make his fortune quickly and then hasten back
East to his former home; yet, as early as the winter of 1849, there was
elected a legislature which met at San José, a Senate of sixteen members
and an Assembly of thirty-six. In this election the new American vote
was in evidence. The miners had already tired of the semi-military phase
of their government, and had met and adopted a state constitution. The
legislature enacted one hundred and forty new laws in two months, and
abolished all former laws; and then, satisfied with its labors, it left
the enforcement of the laws, in the good old American fashion, to
whomsoever might take an interest in the matter.[D] This is our custom
even to-day. Our great cities of the East are practically all governed,
so far as they are governed at all, by civic leagues, civic federations,
citizens' leagues, business men's associations--all protests at
non-enforcement of the law. This protest in '49 and on the Pacific coast
took a sterner form.
[Footnote D: Tuthill: "History of California."]
At one time the city of San Francisco had three separate and distinct
city councils, each claiming to be the only legal one. In spite of the
new state organization, the law was much a matter of go as you please.
Under such conditions it was no wonder that outlawry began to show its
head in bold and well-organized forms. A party of ruffians, who called
themselves the "Hounds," banded together to run all foreigners out of
the rich camps, and to take their diggings over for themselves. A number
of Chileans were beaten or shot, and their property was confiscated or
destroyed. This was not in accordance with the saving grace of American
justice, which devoted to a man that which he had earned. A counter
organization was promptly formed, and the "Hounds" found themselves
confronted with two hundred "special constables," each with a good
rifle. A mass meeting sat as a court, and twenty of the "Hounds" were
tried, ten of them receiving sentences that never were enforced, but
which had the desired effect. So now, while far to the eastward the
Congress was hotly arguing the question of the admission of California
as a state, she was beginning to show an interest in law and justice
when aroused thereto.
It was difficult material out of which to build a civilized community.
The hardest population of the entire world was there; men savage or
civilized by tradition, heathen or Christian once at least, but now all
Californian. Wealth was the one common thing. The average daily return
in the work of mining ranged from twenty to thirty dollars, and no man
might tell when his fortune might be made by a blow of a pick. Some
nuggets of gold weighing twenty-five pounds were discovered. In certain
diggings men picked pure gold from the rock crevices with a spoon or a
knife point. As to values, they were guessed at, the only currency being
gold dust or nuggets. Prodigality was universal. All the gamblers of the
world met in vulture concourse. There was little in the way of home; of
women almost none. Life was as cheap as gold dust. Let those who liked
bother about statehood and government and politics; the average man was
too busy digging and spending gold to trouble over such matters. The
most shameless men were those found in public office. Wealth and
commerce waxed great, but law and civilization languished. The times
were ripening for the growth of some system of law which would offer
proper protection to life and property. The measure of this need may be
seen from the figures of the production of gold. From 1848 to 1856
California produced between five hundred and six hundred million dollars
in virgin gold. What wonder the courts were weak; and what wonder the
Vigilantes became strong!
There were in California three distinct Vigilante movements, those of
1849, 1851, and 1856, the earliest applying rather to the outlying
mining camps than to the city of San Francisco. In 1851, seeing that the
courts made no attempt to punish criminals, a committee was formed which
did much toward enforcing respect for the principles of justice, if not
of law. On June 11 they hanged John Jenkins for robbing a store. A month
later they hanged James Stuart for murdering a sheriff. In August of the
same summer they took out of jail and hanged Whittaker and McKenzie,
Australian ex-convicts, whom they had tried and sentenced, but who had
been rescued by the officers of the law. Two weeks later this committee
disbanded. They paid no attention to the many killings that were going
on over land titles and the like, but confined themselves to punishing
men who had committed intolerable crimes. Theft was as serious as
murder, perhaps more so, in the creed of the time and place. The list of
murders reached appalling dimensions. The times were sadly out of joint.
The legislature was corrupt, graft was rampant--though then unknown by
that name--and the entire social body was restless, discontented, and
uneasy. Politics had become a fine art. The judiciary, lazy and corrupt,
was held in contempt. The dockets of the courts were full, and little
was done to clear them effectively. Criminals did as they liked and went
unwhipped of justice. It was truly a day of violence and license.
Once more the sober and law-loving men of California sent abroad word,
and again the Vigilantes assembled. In 1853 they hanged two Mexicans for
horse stealing, and also a bartender who had shot a citizen near Shasta.
At Jackson they hanged another Mexican for horse stealing, and at
Volcano, in 1854, they hanged a man named Macy for stabbing an old and
helpless man. In this instance vengeance was very swift, for the
murderer was executed within half an hour after his deed. The haste
caused certain criticism when, in the same month one Johnson was hanged
for stabbing a man named Montgomery, at Iowa Hill, who later recovered.
At Los Angeles three men were sentenced to death by the local court, but
the Supreme Court issued a stay for two of them, Brown and Lee. The
people asserted that all must die together, and the mayor of the city
was of the same mind. The third man, Alvitre, was hanged legally on
January 12, 1855. On that day the mayor resigned his office to join the
Vigilantes. Brown was taken out of jail and hanged in spite of the
decision of the Supreme Court. The people were out-running the law. That
same month they hanged another murderer for killing the treasurer of
Tuolumne county. In the following month they hanged three more cattle
thieves in Contra Costa county, and followed this by hanging a horse
thief in Oakland. A larger affair threatened in the following summer,
when thirty-six Mexicans were arrested for killing a party of Americans.
For a time it was proposed to hang all thirty-six, but sober counsel
prevailed and only three were hanged; this after formal jury trial.
Unknown bandits waylaid and killed Isaac B. Wall and T. S. Williamson of
Monterey, and, that same month U. S. Marshal William H. Richardson was
shot by Charles Cora in the streets of San Francisco. The people
grumbled. There was no certainty that justice would ever reach these
offenders. The reputation of the state was ruined, not by the acts of
the Vigilantes, but by those of unscrupulous and unprincipled men in
office and upon the bench. The government was run by gamblers, ruffians,
and thugs. The good men of the state began to prepare for a general
movement of purification and the installation of an actual law. The
great Vigilante movement of 1856 was the result.
The immediate cause of this last organization was the murder of James
King, editor of the _Bulletin_, by James P. Casey. Casey, after shooting
King, was hurried off to jail by his own friends, and there was
protected by a display of military force. King lingered for six days
after he was shot, and the state of public opinion was ominous. Cora,
who had killed Marshal Richardson, had never been punished, and there
seemed no likelihood that Casey would be. The local press was divided.
The religious papers, the _Pacific_ and the _Christian Advocate_, both
openly declared that Casey ought to be hanged. The clergy took up the
matter sternly, and one minister of the Gospel, Rev. J. A. Benton, of
Sacramento, gave utterance to this remarkable but well-grounded
statement: "_A people can be justified in recalling delegated power and
resuming its exercise._" Before we hasten to criticize sweepingly under
the term "mob law" such work as this of the Vigilantes, it will be well
for us to weigh that utterance, and to apply it to conditions of our own
times; to-day is well-nigh as dangerous to American liberties as were
the wilder days of California.
Now, summoned by some unknown command, armed men appeared in the streets
of San Francisco, twenty-four companies in all, with perhaps fifty men
in each company. The Vigilantes had organized again. They brought a
cannon and placed it against the jail gate, and demanded that Casey be
surrendered to them. There was no help for it, and Casey went away
handcuffed, to face a court where political influence would mean
nothing. An hour later the murderer Cora was taken from his cell, and
was hastened away to join Casey in the headquarters building of the
Vigilantes. A company of armed and silent men marched on each side of
the carriage containing the prisoner. The two men were tried in formal
session of the Committee, each having counsel, and all evidence being
carefully weighed.
King died on May 20, 1856, and on May 22d was buried with popular
honors, a long procession of citizens following the body to the
cemetery. A popular subscription was started, and in a brief time over
thirty thousand dollars was raised for the benefit of his widow and
children. When the long procession filed back into the city, it was to
witness, swinging from a beam projecting from a window of Committee
headquarters, the bodies of Casey and Cora.
The Committee now arrested two more men, not for a capital crime, but
for one which lay back of a long series of capital crimes--the stuffing
of ballot-boxes and other election frauds. These men were Billy Mulligan
and the prize-fighter known as Yankee Sullivan. Although advised that he
would have a fair trial and that the death penalty would not be passed
upon him, Yankee Sullivan committed suicide in his cell. The entire
party of lawyers and judges were arrayed against the Committee,
naturally enough. Judge Terry, of the Supreme Court, issued a writ of
_habeas corpus_ for Mulligan. The Committee ignored the sheriff who was
sent to serve the writ. They cleared the streets in front of
headquarters, established six cannon in front of their rooms, put loaded
swivels on top of the roof and mounted a guard of a hundred riflemen.
They brought bedding and provisions to their quarters, mounted a huge
triangle on the roof for a signal to their men all over the city,
arranged the interior of their rooms in the form of a court and, in
short, set themselves up as the law, openly defying their own Supreme
Court of the state. So far from being afraid of the vengeance of the
law, they arrested two more men for election frauds, Chas. P. Duane and
"Woolly" Kearney. All their prisoners were guarded in cells within the
headquarters building.
The opposition to the Committee now organized in turn under the name of
the "Law and Order Men," and held a public meeting. This was numerously
attended by members of the Vigilante Committee, whose books were now
open for enrollment. Not even the criticism of their own friends stayed
these men in their resolution. They went even further. Governor Johnson
issued a proclamation to them to disband and disperse. They paid no more
attention to this than they had to Judge Terry's writ of _habeas
corpus_. The governor threatened them with the militia, but it was not
enough to frighten them. General Sherman resigned his command in the
state militia, and counseled moderation at so dangerous a time. Many of
the militia turned in their rifles to the Committee, which got other
arms from vessels in the harbor, and from carelessly guarded armories.
Halting at no responsibility, a band of the Committee even boarded a
schooner which was carrying down a cargo of rifles from the governor to
General Howard at San Francisco, and seized the entire lot. Shortly
after this they confiscated a second shipment which the governor was
sending down from Sacramento in the same way; thus seizing property of
the federal government. If there was such a crime as high treason, they
committed it, and did so openly and without hesitation. Governor
Johnson contented himself with drawing up a statement of the situation,
which was sent down to President Pierce at Washington, with the request
that he instruct naval officers on the Pacific station to supply arms to
the State of California, which had been despoiled by certain of its
citizens. President Pierce turned over the matter to his
attorney-general, Caleb Cushing, who rendered an opinion saying that
Governor Johnson had not yet exhausted the state remedies, and that the
United States government could not interfere.
Little remained for the Committee to do to show its resolution to act as
the State _pro tempore_. That little it now proceeded to do by
practically suspending the Supreme Court of California. In making an
arrest of a witness wanted by the Committee, Sterling A. Hopkins, one of
the policemen retained for work by the Committee, was stabbed in the
throat by Judge Terry, of the Supreme Bench, who was very bitter against
all members of the Committee. It was supposed that the wound would prove
fatal, and at once the Committee sounded the call for general assembly.
The city went into two hostile camps, Terry and his friend, Dr. Ashe,
taking refuge in the armory where the "Law and Order" faction kept
their arms. The members of the Vigilante Committee besieged this place,
and presently took charge of Terry and Ashe, as prisoners. Then the
scouts of the Committee went out after the arms of all the armories
belonging to the governor and the "Law and Order" men who supported him,
the lawyers and politicians who felt that their functions were being
usurped. Two thousand rifles were taken, and the opposing party was left
without arms. The entire state, so to speak, was now in the hands of the
"Committee of Vigilance," a body of men, quiet, law-loving,
law-enforcing, but of course technically traitors and criminals. The
parallel of this situation has never existed elsewhere in American
history.
Had Hopkins died the probability is that Judge Terry would have been
hanged by the Committee, but fortunately he did not die. Terry lay a
prisoner in the cell assigned him at the Committee's rooms for seven
weeks, by which time Hopkins had recovered from the wound given him by
Terry. The case became one of national interest, and tirades against
"the Stranglers" were not lacking; but the Committee went on enrolling
men. And it did not open its doors for its prisoners, although appeal
was made to Congress in Terry's behalf--an appeal which was referred to
the Committee on Judiciary, and so buried.
Terry was finally released, much to the regret of many of the Committee,
who thought he should have been punished. The executive committee called
together the board of delegates, and issued a statement showing that
death and banishment were the only penalties optional with them. Death
they could not inflict, because Hopkins had recovered; and banishment
they thought impractical at that time, as it might prolong discussion
indefinitely, and enforce a longer term in service than the Committee
cared for. It was the earnest wish of all to disband at the first moment
that they considered their state and city fit to take care of
themselves, and the sacredness of the ballot-box again insured. To
assure this latter fact, they had arrayed themselves against the federal
government, as certainly they had against the state government.
The Committee now hanged two more murderers--Hetherington and Brace--the
former a gambler from St. Louis, the latter a youth of New York
parentage, twenty-one years of age, but hardened enough to curse
volubly upon the scaffold. By the middle of August, 1856, they had no
more prisoners in charge, and were ready to turn the city over to its
own system of government. Their report, published in the following fall,
showed they had hanged four men and banished many others, besides
frightening out of the country a large criminal population that did not
tarry for arrest and trial.
If opinion was divided to some extent in San Francisco, where those
stirring deeds occurred, the sentiment of the outlying communities of
California was almost a unit in favor of the Vigilantes, and their
action received the sincere flattery of imitation, as half a score of
criminals learned to their sorrow on impromptu scaffolds. There was no
large general organization in any other community, however. After a time
some of the banished men came back, and many damage suits were argued
later in the courts; but small satisfaction came to those claimants, and
few men who knew of the deeds of the "Committee of Vigilance" ever cared
to discuss them. Indeed it was practically certain that any man who ever
served on a Western vigilance committee finished his life with sealed
lips. Had he ventured to talk of what he knew he would have met
contempt or something harsher.
A political capital was made out of the situation in San Francisco. The
"Committee of Vigilance" felt that it had now concluded its work and was
ready to go back to civil life. On August 18, 1856, the Committee
marched openly in review through the streets of the city, five thousand
one hundred and thirty-seven men in line, with three companies of
artillery, eighteen cannon, a company of dragoons, and a medical staff
of forty odd physicians. There were in this body one hundred and fifty
men who had served in the old Committee in 1851. After the parade the
men halted, the assemblage broke up into companies, the companies into
groups; and thus, quietly, with no vaunting of themselves and no
concealment of their acts, there passed away one of the most singular
and significant organizations of American citizens ever known. They did
this with the quiet assertion that if their services were again needed,
they would again assemble; and they printed a statement covering their
actions in detail, showing to any fair-minded man that what they had
done was indeed for the good of the whole community, which had been
wronged by those whom it had elected to power, those who had set
themselves up as masters where they had been chosen as servants.
The "Committee of Vigilance" of San Francisco was made up of men from
all walks of life and all political parties. It had any amount of money
at its command that it required, for its members were of the best and
most influential citizens. It maintained, during its existence, quarters
unique in their way, serving as arms-room, trial court, fortress, and
prison. It was not a mob, but a grave and orderly band of men, and its
deliberations were formal and exact, its labors being divided among
proper sub-committees and boards. The quarters were kept open day and
night, always ready for swift action, if necessary. It had an executive
committee, which upon occasion conferred with a board of delegates
composed of three men from each subdivision of the general body. The
executive committee consisted of thirty-three members, and its decision
was final; but it could not enforce a death penalty except on a
two-thirds vote of those present. It had a prosecuting attorney, and it
tried no prisoner without assigning to him competent counsel. It had
also a police force, with a chief of police and a sheriff with several
deputies. In short, it took over the government, and was indeed the
government, municipal and state in one. Recent as was its life, its
deeds to-day are well-nigh forgotten. Though opinion may be still
divided in certain quarters, California need not be ashamed of this
"Committee of Vigilance." She should be proud of it, for it was largely
through its unthanked and dangerous safeguarding of the public interests
that California gained her social system of to-day.
In all the history of American desperadoism and of the movements which
have checked it, there is no page more worth study than this from the
story of the great Golden State. The moral is a sane, clean, and strong
one. The creed of the "Committee of Vigilance" is one which we might
well learn to-day; and its practice would leave us with more dignity of
character than we can claim, so long as we content ourselves merely with
outcry and criticism, with sweeping accusation of our unfaithful public
servants, and without seeing that they are punished. There is nothing
but manhood and freedom and justice in the covenant of the Committee.
That covenant all American citizens should be ready to sign and live up
to: "We do bind ourselves each unto the other by a solemn oath to do and
perform every just and lawful act for the maintenance of law and order,
_and to sustain the laws when faithfully and properly administered_. But
we are determined that no thief, burglar, incendiary, assassin,
_ballot-box stuffer or other disturber of the peace_, shall escape
punishment, either by quibbles of the law, the carelessness of the
police or a laxity of those who pretend to administer justice."
What a man earns, that is his--such was the lesson of California.
Self-government is our right as a people--that is what the Vigilantes
said. When the laws failed of execution, then it was the people's right
to resume the power that they had delegated, or which had been usurped
from them--that is their statement as quoted by one of the ablest of
many historians of this movement. The people might withdraw authority
when faithless servants used it to thwart justice--that was what the
Vigilantes preached. It is good doctrine to-day.
Chapter VI
The Outlaw of the Mountains--_The Gold Stampedes of the '60's_--_Armed
Bandits of the Mountain Mining Camps_.
The greatest of American gold stampedes, and perhaps the greatest of the
world, not even excepting that of Australia, was that following upon the
discovery of gold in California. For twenty years all the West was mad
for gold. No other way would serve but the digging of wealth directly
from the soil. Agriculture was too slow, commerce too tame, to satisfy
the bold population of the frontier. The history of the first struggle
for mining claims in California--one stampede after another, as this,
that and the other "strike" was reported in new localities--was repeated
all over the vast region of the auriferous mountain lands lying between
the plains and California, which were swiftly prospected by men who had
now learned well the prospector's trade. The gold-hunters lapped back on
their own trails, and, no longer content with California, began to
prospect lower Oregon, upper Idaho, and Western Montana. Walla Walla was
a supply point for a time. Florence was a great mountain market, and
Lewiston. One district after another sprang into prominence, to fade
away after a year or two of feverish life. The placers near Bannack
caught a wild set of men, who surged back from California. Oro Fino was
a temporary capital; then the fabulously rich placer which made Alder
Gulch one of the quickly perished but still unforgotten diggings.
The flat valley of this latter gulch housed several "towns," but was
really for a dozen miles a continuous string of miners' cabins. The city
of Helena is built on the tailings of these placer washings, and its
streets are literally paved with gold even to-day. Here in 1863, while
the great conflict between North and South was raging, a great community
of wild men, not organized into anything fit to be called society,
divided and fought bitterly for control of the apparently exhaustless
wealth which came pouring from the virgin mines. These clashing
factions repeated, in intensified form, the history of California. They
were even more utterly cut off from all the world. Letters and papers
from the states had to reach the mountains by way of California, via the
Horn or the Isthmus. Touch with the older civilization was utterly lost;
of law there was none.
Upon the social horizon now appeared the sinister figure of the trained
desperado, the professional bad man. The business of outlawry was turned
into a profession, one highly organized, relatively safe and extremely
lucrative. There was wealth to be had for the asking or the taking. Each
miner had his buckskin purse filled with native gold. This dust was like
all other dust. It could not be traced nor identified; and the old
saying, "'Twas mine, 'tis his," might here of all places in the world
most easily become true. Checks, drafts, currency as we know it now, all
the means by which civilized men keep record of their property
transactions, were unknown. The gold-scales established the only
currency, and each man was his own banker, obliged to be his own peace
officer, and the defender of his own property.
Now our desperado appeared, the man who had killed his man, or, more
likely, several men, and who had not been held sternly to an accounting
for his acts; the man with the six-shooter and the skill to use it more
swiftly and accurately than the average man; the man with the mind which
did not scruple at murder. He found much to encourage him, little to
oppose him. "The crowd from both East and West had now arrived. The town
was full of gold-hunters. Expectation lighted up the countenance of
every new-comer. Few had yet realized the utter despair of failure in a
mining camp. In the presence of vice in all its forms, men who were
staid and exemplary at home laid aside their morality like a useless
garment, and yielded to the seductive influences spread for their ruin.
The gambling-shops and hurdy-gurdy saloons--beheld for the first time by
many of these fortune-seekers--lured them on step by step, until many of
them abandoned all thought of the object they had in pursuit for lives
of shameful and criminal indulgence. The condition of society thus
produced was fatal to all attempts at organization, either for
protection or good order."
Yet the same condition made opportunity for those who did not wish to
see a society established. Wherever the law-abiding did not organize,
the bandits did; and the strength of their party, the breadth and
boldness of its operations, and the length of time it carried on its
unmolested operations, form one of the most extraordinary incidents in
American history. They killed, robbed, and terrorized over hundreds of
miles of mountain country, for years setting at defiance all attempts at
their restraint. They recognized no command except that of their
"chief," whose title was always open to contest, and who gained his own
position only by being more skilful, more bloodthirsty, and more
unscrupulous than his fellows.
Henry Plummer, the most important captain of these cutthroats of the
mountains, had a hundred or more men in his widely scattered criminal
confederacy. More than one hundred murders were committed by these
banditti in the space of three years. Many others were, without doubt,
committed and never traced. Dead bodies were common in those hills, and
often were unidentified. The wanderer from the States usually kept his
own counsel. None knew who his family might be; and that family,
missing a member who disappeared into the maw of the great West of that
day of danger, might never know the fate of the one mysteriously
vanished.
These robbers had their confederates scattered in all ranks of life.
Plummer himself was sheriff of his county, and had confederates in
deputies or city marshals. This was a strange feature of this old
desperadoism in the West--it paraded often in the guise of the law. We
shall find further instances of this same phenomenon. Employés, friends,
officials--there was none that one might trust. The organization of the
robbers even extended to the stage lines, and a regular system of
communication existed by which the allies advised each other when and
where such and such a passenger was going, with such and such an amount
of gold upon him. The holding up of the stage was something regularly
expected, and the traveler who had any money or valuables drew a long
breath when he reached a region where there was really a protecting law.
Men were shot down in the streets on little or no provocation, and the
murderer boasted of his crime and defied punishment. The dance-halls
were run day and night. The drinking of whiskey, and, moreover, bad
whiskey, was a thing universal. Vice was everywhere and virtue was not.
Those few who had an aim and an ambition in life were long in the
minority and, in the welter of a general license, they might not
recognize each other and join hands. Murder and pillage ruled, until at
length the spirit of law and order, born anew of necessity, grew and
gained power as it did in most early communities of the West. How these
things in time took place may best be seen by reference to the bloody
biographies of some of the most reckless desperadoes ever seen in any
land.
Chapter VII
Henry Plummer--_A Northern Bad Man_--_The Head of the Robber Band in the
Montana Mining Country_--_A Man of Brains and Ability, but a
Cold-Blooded Murderer_.
Henry Plummer was for several years in the early '60's the "chief" of
the widely extended band of robbers and murderers who kept the
placer-mining fields of Montana and Idaho in a state of terror. Posing
part of the time as an officer of the law, he was all the time the
leader in the reign of lawlessness. He was always ready for combat, and
he so relied upon his own skill that he would even give his antagonist
the advantage--or just enough advantage to leave himself sure to kill
him. His victims in duels of this sort were many, and, as to his victims
in cold-blooded robbery, in which death wiped out the record, no one
will ever know the list.
Plummer was born in Connecticut in 1837, and, until his departure as a
young man for the West, he was all that might be expected of one brought
up under the chastening influences of a New England home. He received a
good education, and became a polished, affable, and gentlemanly
appearing man. He was about five feet ten, possibly five feet eleven
inches in height, and weighed about one hundred and sixty pounds, being
rather slender in appearance. His face was handsome and his demeanor
always frank and open, although he was quiet and did not often talk
unless accosted. His voice was low and pleasant, and he had no bravado
or swagger about him. His eye was light in color and singularly devoid
of expression. Two features gave him a sinister look--his forehead,
which was low and brutish, and his eye, which was cold and fish-like.
His was a strong, well-keyed nervous organization. He was quick as a cat
when in action, though apparently suave and easy in disposition. He was
a good pistol shot, perhaps the best of all the desperadoes who infested
Idaho and Montana at that time. Not even in his cups did he lose control
of voice and eye and weapon. He was always ready--a cool, quiet,
self-possessed, well-regulated killing machine.
At the date of Plummer's arrival in the mining country, the town of
Lewiston, Idaho, was the emporium of a wide region then embraced under
the name of Idaho Territory; the latter also including Montana at that
time. Where his life had been spent previous to that is not known, but
it is thought that he came over from California. Plummer set up as a
gambler, and this gave him the key to the brotherhood of the bad.
Gamblers usually stick together pretty closely, and institute a sort of
free-masonry of their own; so that Plummer was not long in finding,
among men of his own profession and their associates, a number of others
whom he considered safe to take into his confidence. Every man accepted
by Plummer was a murderer. He would have no weaklings. No one can tell
how many victims his associates had had before they went into his
alliance; but it is sure that novices in man-killing were not desired,
nor any who had not been proved of nerve. Plummer soon had so many men
that he set up a rendezvous at points on all the trails leading out from
Lewiston to such mines as were producing any gold. One robbery followed
another, until the band threw off all restraint and ran the towns as
they liked, paying for what they took when they felt like it, and
laughing at the protests of the minority of the population, which was
placed in the hard strait of being in that country and unable to get out
without being robbed. It was the intention to seize the property of
every man who was there and who was not accepted as a member of the
gang.
One killing after another occurred on the trails, and man after man was
lost and never traced. Assaults were made upon many men who escaped, but
no criminal could be located, and, indeed, there was no law by which any
of them could be brought to book. The express riders were fired upon and
robbed and the pack trains looted. No man expected to cross the mountain
trails without meeting some of the robbers, and, when he did meet them,
he expected to be killed if he made resistance, for they outnumbered the
parties they attacked in nearly all instances. The outlaws were now
indeed about three times as numerous as those not in sympathy with them.
Rendered desperate by this state of affairs, a few resolute citizens who
wanted law and order found each other out at last and organized into a
vigilance committee, remembering the success of the Vigilantes of
California, whose work was still recent history. Plummer himself was
among the first to join this embryonic vigilante movement, as was the
case in so many other similar movements in other parts of the West,
where the criminal joined the law-loving in order to find out what the
latter intended to do. His address was such as to disarm completely all
suspicion, and he had full knowledge of facts which enabled him to
murder for vengeance as well as for gain.
After Oro Fino was worked out as a placer field, the prospectors located
other grounds east of the Salmon River range, at Elk City and Florence,
and soon Lewiston was forsaken, all the population trooping off over the
mountains to the new fields. This broke up the vigilante movement in its
infancy, and gave Plummer a longer lease of life for his plans. All
those who had joined the vigilante movement were marked men. One after
another they were murdered, none knew by whom, or why. Masked robbers
were seen every day along the trails leading between one remote mining
camp and another, but no one suspected Henry Plummer, who was serving
well in his double rôle.
Meantime, additional placer grounds had been discovered a hundred and
fifty miles south of Florence, on the Boise river, and some valuable
strikes were also made far to the north, at the upper waters of the
Beaverhead. All the towns to the westward were now abandoned, and the
miners left Florence as madly as they had rushed to it from Oro Fino and
Elk City. West Bannack and East Bannack were now all the cry. To these
new points, as may be supposed, the organized band of robbers fled with
the others. Plummer, who had tried Elk City, Deer Lodge, and other
points, now appeared at Bannack.
One after another reports continued to come of placers discovered here
and there in the upper Rockies. Among all these, the strikes on Gold
Creek proved to be the most extensive and valuable. A few Eastern men,
almost by accident, had found fair "pay" there, and returned to that
locality when they found themselves unable to get across the
snow-covered mountains to Florence. These few men at the Gold Creek
diggings got large additions from expeditions made up in Denver and
bound for Florence, who also were unable to get across the Salmon River
mountains. Yet others came out in the summer of 1862, by way of the
upper plains and the Missouri river, so that the accident of the season,
so to speak, turned aside the traffic intended to reach Florence into
quite another region. This fact, as events proved, had much to do with
the later fate of Henry Plummer and his associates.
These Eastern men were different from those who had been schooled in the
mines of the Pacific Slope. They still clung to law and order; and they
did not propose to be robbed. The first news of the strikes brought over
the advance guard of the roughs who had been running the other camps;
and, as soon as these were unmasked by acts of their own, the little
advance guard of civilization shot one of them, Arnett, and hung two
others, Jernigan and Spillman. This was the real beginning of a
permanent vigilante force in Montana. It afforded perhaps the only known
instance of a man being buried with a six-shooter in one hand and a hand
of cards in the other. Arnett was killed in a game of cards, and died
with his death grip thus fixed.
The new diggings did not at first prove themselves, and the camp at
Bannack, on Grasshopper Creek, was more prosperous. Henry Plummer,
therefore, elected Bannack as his headquarters. Others of the loosely
connected banditti began to drop into Bannack from other districts, and
Plummer was soon surrounded by his clan and kin in crime. George Ives,
Bill Mitchell, Charlie Reeves, Cy Skinner, and others began operations
on the same lines which had so distinguished them at the earlier
diggings, west of the range. In a few weeks Bannack was as bad as
Lewiston or Florence had ever been. In fact, it became so bad that the
Vigilantes began to show their teeth, although they confined their
sentences to banishment. The black sheep and the white began now to be
segregated.
Plummer, shrewd to see the drift of opinion, saw that he must now play
his hand out to the finish, that he could not now reform. He accordingly
laid his plans to kill Jack Crawford, who was chosen as miners' sheriff.
Plummer undertook one expedient after another to draw Crawford into a
quarrel, in which he knew he could kill him; for Plummer's speed with
the pistol had been proved when he killed Jack Cleveland, one of his own
best gun-fighters. Rumor ran that he was the best pistol shot in the
Rockies and as bad a man as the worst. Plummer thought that Crawford
suspected him of belonging to the bandits, and so doomed him. Crawford
was wary, and defeated three separate attempts to waylay and kill him,
besides avoiding several quarrels that were thrust upon him by Plummer
or his men. Dick Phleger, a friend of Crawford, was also marked by
Plummer, who challenged him to fight with pistols, as he frequently had
challenged Crawford. Phleger was a braver man than Crawford, but he
declined the duel. Plummer would have killed them both. He only wanted
the appearance of an "even break," with the later plea of
"self-defence," which has shielded so many bad men from punishment for
murder.
Plummer now tried treachery, and told Crawford they would be friends.
All the time he was hunting a chance to kill him. At length he held
Crawford up in a restaurant, and stood waiting for him with a rifle. A
friend handed Crawford a rifle, and the latter slipped up and took a
shot from the corner of the house at Plummer, who was across the street.
The ball struck Plummer's right arm and tore it to pieces. Crawford
missed him with a second shot, and Plummer walked back to his own
cabin. Here he had a long siege with his wound, refusing to allow his
arm to be amputated, since he knew he might as well be dead as so
crippled. He finally recovered, although the ball was never removed and
the bone never knit. The ball lodged in his wrist and was found there
after his death, worn smooth as silver by the action of the bones.
Crawford escaped down the Missouri river, to which he fled at Fort
Benton. He never came back to the country. Plummer went on practising
with the six-shooter with his left hand, and became a very good
left-hand shot. He knew that his only safety lay in his skill with
weapons.
Plummer's physician was Dr. Glick, who operated under cover of a
shotgun, and with the cheerful assurance that if he killed Plummer by
accident, he himself would be killed. After that Glick dressed the
wounds of more than one outlaw, but dared not tell of it. Plummer
admitted to him at last that these were his men and told Glick he would
kill him if he ever breathed a word of this confidence. So the knowledge
of the existence of the banditti was known to one man for a long time.
As to Bannack, it was one of the wildest camps ever known in any land.
Pistol fire was heard incessantly, and one victim after another was
added to the list. George Ives, Johnny Cooper, George Carrhart, Hayes
Lyons, Cy Skinner, and others of the toughs were now open associates of
the leading spirit, Plummer. The condition of lawlessness and terror was
such that all the decent men would have gone back to the States, but the
same difficulties that had kept them from getting across to Florence now
kept them from getting back East. The winter held them prisoners.
Henry Plummer was now elected sheriff for the Bannack mining district,
to succeed Crawford, whom he had run out of the country. It seems very
difficult to understand how this could have occurred; but it will serve
to show the numerical strength of Plummer's party. The latter, now
married, professed to have reformed. In reality, he was deeper in
deviltry than ever in his life.
The diggings at Gold Creek and Bannack were now eclipsed by the
sensational discoveries on the famous Alder Gulch, one of the phenomenal
placers of the world, and the most productive ever known in America. The
stampede was fast and furious to these new diggings. In ten days the
gulch was staked out for twelve miles, and the cabins of the miners
were occupied for all of that distance, and scattered over a long, low
flat, whose vegetation was quickly swept away. The new camp that sprung
up on one end of this bar was called Virginia City. It need not be said
that among the first settlers there were the outlaws earlier mentioned,
with several others: Jack Gallagher, Buck Stinson, Ned Ray, and others,
these three named being "deputies" of "Sheriff" Plummer. A sort of court
was formed for trying disputed mining claims. Charley Forbes was clerk
of this court, and incidentally one of Plummer's band! This clerk and
these deputies killed one Dillingham, whom they suspected of informing a
friend of a robbery planned to make away with him on the trail from
Bannack to Virginia City. They were "tried" by the court and freed.
Hayes Lyons admitted privately that Plummer had told him to kill the
informer Dillingham. The invariable plan of this bloodthirsty man was to
destroy unfavorable testimony by means of death.
The unceasing flood of gold from the seemingly exhaustless gulch caused
three or four more little camps or towns to spring up; but Virginia City
now took the palm for frontier reputation in hardness. Ten millions in
"dust" was washed out in one year. Every one had gold, sacks and cans of
it. The wild license of the place was unspeakably vitiating. Fights with
weapons were incessant. Rude dance halls and saloons were crowded with
truculent, armed men in search of trouble. Churches and schools were
unknown. Tents, log cabins, and brush shanties made the residences.
"Hacks rattled to and fro between the several towns, freighted with
drunken and rowdy humanity of both sexes. Citizens of acknowledged
respectability often walked, more often perhaps rode side by side on
horseback, with noted courtesans, in open day, through the crowded
streets, and seemingly suffered no harm in reputation. Pistols flashed,
bowie-knives flourished, oaths filled the air. This was indeed the reign
of unbridled license, and men who at first regarded it with disgust and
terror, by constant exposure soon learned to become part of it, and to
forget that they had ever been aught else. Judges, lawyers, doctors,
even clergymen, could not claim exemption."
This was in 1863. At that time, the nearest capitals were Olympia, on
Puget Sound; Yankton, two thousand miles away; and Lewiston, seven
hundred miles away. What machinery of the law was there to hinder
Plummer and his men? What better field than this one, literally
overflowing with gold, could they have asked for their operations? And
what better chief than Plummer?
His next effort was to be appointed deputy United States marshal, and he
received the indorsement of the leading men of Bannack. Plummer
afterward tried several times to kill Nathaniel P. Langford, who caused
his defeat, but was unsuccessful in getting the opportunity he sought.
From Bannack to Salt Lake City was about five hundred miles. Mails by
this time came in from Salt Lake City, which was the supply point. If a
man wanted to send out gold to his people in the States, it had to go
over this long trail across the wild regions. There was no mail service,
and no express office nearer than Salt Lake. Merchants sent out their
funds by private messenger. Every such journey was a risk of death.
Plummer had clerks in every institution that was making money, and these
kept him posted as to the times when shipments of dust were about to be
made; they also told him when any well-staked miner was going out to
the States. Plummer's men were posted all along these mountain trails.
No one will ever know how many men were killed in all on the Salt Lake
trail.
There was a stage also between Bannack and Virginia City, and this was
regarded as a legitimate and regular booty producer by the gang.
Whenever a rich passenger took stage, a confederate at the place put a
mark on the vehicle so that it could be read at the next stop. At this
point there was sure to be others of the gang, who attended to further
details. Sometimes two or three thousand dollars would be taken from a
single passenger. A stage often carried fifteen or twenty thousand
dollars in dust. Plummer knew when and where and how each stage was
robbed, but in his capacity as sheriff covered up the traces of all his
associates.
The robbers who did the work were usually masked, and although
suspicions were rife and mutterings began to grow louder, there was no
actual evidence against Plummer until one day he held up a young man by
name of Tilden, who voiced his belief that he knew the man who had held
him up. Further evidence was soon to follow. A pack-train, bound for
Salt Lake, had no less than eighty thousand dollars in dust in its
charge, and Plummer had sent out Dutch John and Steve Marshland to hold
up the train. The freighters were too plucky, and both the bandits were
wounded, and so marked, although for the time they escaped. George Ives
also was recognized by one or two victims and began to be watched on
account of his numerous open murders.
At length, the dead body of a young man named Tiebalt was found in a
thicket near Alder Gulch, under circumstances showing a revolting
murder. At last the slumbering spirit of the Vigilantes began to awaken.
Two dozen men of the camp went out and arrested Long John, George Ives,
Alex Carter, Whiskey Bill, Bob Zachary, and Johnny Cooper. These men
were surprised in their camp, and among their long list of weapons were
some that had been taken from men who had been robbed or murdered. These
weapons were identified by friends. Old Tex was another man taken in
charge, and George Hilderman yet another. All these men wanted a "jury
trial," and wanted it at Virginia City, where Plummer would have
official influence enough to get his associates released! The captors,
however, were men from Nevada, the other leading camp in Alder Gulch,
and they took their prisoners there.
At once a Plummer man hastened out on horseback to get the chief on the
ground, riding all night across the mountains to Bannack to carry the
news that the citizens had at last rebelled against anarchy, robbery,
and murder. On the following morning, two thousand men had gathered at
Nevada City, and had resolved to try the outlaws. As there was rivalry
between Virginia and Nevada camps, a jury was made up of twenty-four
men, twelve from each camp. The miners' court, most dread of all
tribunals, was in session.
Some forms of the law were observed. Long John was allowed to turn
state's evidence. He swore that George Ives had killed Tiebalt, and
declared that he shot him while Tiebalt was on his knees praying, after
he had been told that he must die. Then a rope was put around his neck
and he was dragged to a place of concealment in the thicket where the
body was found. Tiebalt was not dead while so dragged, for his hands
were found full of grass and twigs which he had clutched. Ives was
condemned to death, and the law and order men were strong enough to
suppress the armed disturbance at once started by his friends, none of
whom could realize that the patient citizens were at last taking the law
into their own hands. A scaffold was improvised and Ives was hung,--the
first of the Plummer gang to meet retribution. The others then in
custody were allowed to go under milder sentences.
The Vigilantes now organized with vigor and determination. One bit of
testimony was added to another, and one man now dared to voice his
suspicions to another. Twenty-five determined men set out to secure
others of the gang now known to have been united in this long
brotherhood. Some of these men were now fleeing the country, warned by
the fate of Ives; but the Vigilantes took Red Yager and Buck Stinson and
Ned Ray, two of them Plummer's deputies, as well as another confederate
named Brown. The party stopped at the Lorain Ranch, near a cottonwood
grove, and tried their prisoners without going into town. Red Yager
confessed in full before he was hung, and it was on his testimony that
the whole secret league of robbers was exposed and eventually brought to
justice. He gave the following list:
Henry Plummer was chief of the gang; Bill Bunton, stool-pigeon and
second in command; George Brown, secretary; Sam Bunton, roadster; Cyrus
Skinner, fence, spy and roadster; George Shears, horse thief and
roadster; Frank Parish, horse thief and roadster; Bill Hunter, telegraph
man and roadster; Ned Ray, council-room keeper at Bannack City; George
Ives, Stephen Marshland, Dutch John (Wagner), Alex Carter, Whiskey Bill
(Graves), Johnny Cooper, Buck Stinson, Mexican Frank, Bob Zachary, Boone
Helm, Clubfoot George (Lane), Billy Terwilliger, Gad Moore, were
roadsters.
The noose was now tightening around the neck of the outlaw, Henry
Plummer, whose adroitness had so long stood him in good stead. The
honest miners found that their sheriff was the leader of the outlaws!
His doom was said then and there, with that of all these others.
A party of the Virginia City law and order men slipped over to Bannack,
Henry Plummer's home. In a few hours the news had spread of what had
happened at the other camps, and a branch organization of the Vigilantes
was formed for Bannack. Stinson and Ray were now arrested, and then
Plummer himself, the chief, the brains of all this long-secret band of
marauders. He was surprised with his coat and arms off, and taken
prisoner. A few moments later, he was facing a scaffold, where, as
sheriff, he had lately hung a man. The law had no delays. No court could
quibble here. Not all Plummer's wealth could save him now, nor all his
intellect and cool audacity.
An agony of remorse and fear now came upon the outlaw chief. He fell
upon his knees, called upon God to save him, begged, pleaded, wept like
a child, declared that he was too wicked to die thus soon and
unprepared. It was useless. The full proof of all his many crimes was
laid before him.
Ray, writhing and cursing, was the first to be hanged. He got his finger
under the rope around his neck and died hard, but died. Stinson, also
cursing, went next. It was then time for Plummer, and those who had this
work in hand felt compunction at hanging a man so able, so urbane and so
commanding. None the less, he was told to prepare. He asked for time to
pray, and was told to pray from the cross-beam. He said good-by to a
friend or two, and asked his executioners to "give him a good drop." He
seemed to fear suffering, he who had caused so much suffering. To oblige
him, the men lifted his body high up and let it fall, and he died with
little struggle.
To cut short a long story of bloody justice, it may be added that of the
men named as guilty by Yager every one was arrested, tried, and hung by
the Vigilantes. Plummer for some time must have dreaded detection, for
he tried to cover up his guilt by writing back home to the States that
he was in danger of being hanged on account of his Union sympathies. His
family would not believe his guilt, and looked on him as a martyr. They
sent out a brother and sister to look into the matter, but these too
found proof which left them no chance to doubt. The whole ghastly
revelation of a misspent life lay before them. Even Plummer's wife, whom
he loved very much and who was a good woman, was at last convinced of
what at first she could not believe. Plummer had been able to conceal
from even his wife the least suspicion that he was not an honorable man.
His wife was east in the States at the time of his death.
Plummer went under his true name. George Ives was a Wisconsin boy from
near Racine. Both he and Plummer were twenty-seven years of age when
killed, but they had compressed much evil into so short a span. Plummer
himself was a master of men, a brave and cool spirit, an expert with
weapons, and in all not a bad specimen of the bad man at his worst. He
was a murderer, but after all was not enough a murderer. No outlaw of
later years so closely resembled the great outlaw, John A. Murrell, as
did Henry Plummer, but the latter differed in one regard:--he spared
victims, who later arose to accuse him.
The frontier has produced few bloodier records than Plummer's. He was
principal or accessory, as has been stated, in more than one hundred
murders, not to mention innumerable robberies and thefts. His life was
lived out in scenes typical of the early Western frontier. The madness
of adventure in new wild fields, the lust of gold and its unparalleled
abundance drove to crime men who might have been respected and of note
in proper ranks of life and in other surroundings.
Chapter VIII
Boone Helm--_A Murderer, Cannibal, and Robber_--_A Typical Specimen of
Absolute Human Depravity_.
Henry Plummer was what might be called a good instance of the gentleman
desperado, if such a thing be possible; a man of at least a certain
amount of refinement, and certainly one who, under different
surroundings, might have led a different life. For the sake of contrast,
if for nothing else, we may take the case of Boone Helm, one of
Plummer's gang, who was the opposite of Plummer in every way except the
readiness to rob and kill. Boone Helm was bad, and nothing in the world
could ever have made him anything but bad. He was, by birth and
breeding, low, coarse, cruel, animal-like and utterly depraved, and for
him no name but ruffian can fitly apply.
Helm was born in Kentucky, but his family moved to Missouri during his
early youth, so that the boy was brought up on the borderland between
civilization and the savage frontier; for this was about the time of the
closing days of the old Santa Fé Trail, and the towns of Independence
and Westport were still sending out their wagon trains to the far
mountain regions. By the time Boone Helm was grown, and soon after his
marriage, the great gold craze of California broke out, and he joined
the rush westward. Already he was a murderer, and already he had a
reputation as a quarrelsome and dangerous man. He was of powerful build
and turbulent temper, delighting in nothing so much as feats of
strength, skill, and hardihood. His community was glad to be rid of him,
as was, indeed, any community in which he ever lived.
In the California diggings, Helm continued the line of life mapped out
for him from birth. He met men of his own kidney there, and was ever
ready for a duel with weapons. In this way he killed several men, no one
knows how many; but this sort of thing was so common in the case of so
many men in those days that little attention was paid to it. It must
have been a very brutal murder which at length caused him to flee the
Coast to escape the vengeance of the miners. He headed north and east,
after a fashion of the times following the California boom, and was
bound for the mountain placers in 1853, when he is recorded as appearing
at the Dalles, Oregon. He and a half-dozen companions, whom he had
picked up on the way, and most of whom were strangers to each other, now
started out for Fort Hall, Idaho, intending to go from there to a point
below Salt Lake City.
The beginning of the terrible mountain winter season caught these men
somewhere west of the main range in eastern Oregon, in the depths of as
rugged a mountain region as any of the West. They were on horseback, and
so could carry small provisions; but in some way they pushed on deeper
and deeper into the mountains, until they got to the Bannack river,
where they were attacked by Indians and chased into a country none of
them knew. At last they got over east as far as the Soda Springs on the
Bear river, where they were on well-known ground. By this time, however,
their horses had given out, and their food was exhausted. They killed
their horses, made snowshoes with the hides, and sought to reach Fort
Hall. The party was now reduced to one of those awful starving marches
of the wilderness which are now and then chronicled in Western life.
This meant that the weak must perish where they fell.
The strength of Helm and one of the others, Burton, enabled them to push
on ahead, leaving their companions behind in the mountains. Almost
within reach of Fort Hall, Burton gave out and was left behind in an
abandoned cabin. Helm pushed on into the old stockade, but found it also
abandoned for the winter season, and he could get no food there. He then
went back to where he had left Burton, and, according to his own report,
he was trying to get wood for a fire when he heard a pistol-shot and
returned to find that Burton had killed himself. He stayed on at this
spot, and, like a hyena, preyed upon the dead body of his companion. He
ate one leg of the body, and then, wrapping up the other in a piece of
old shirt, threw it across his shoulder and started on further east. He
had, before this on the march, declared to the party that he had
practiced cannibalism at an earlier time, and proposed to do so again if
it became necessary on this trip across the mountains. His calm threat
was now verified. Helm was found at last at an Indian camp by John W.
Powell, who learned that he was as hard a character as he had ever run
across. None the less, he took care of Helm, gave him food and clothes,
and took him to the settlements around Salt Lake. Powell found that Helm
had a bag containing over fourteen hundred dollars in coin, which he had
carried across the divide with him through all his hardships. He would
take no pay from Helm, and the latter never even thanked him for his
kindness, but left him as soon as he reached the Mormon settlements.
Here the abandoned ruffian boasted of what he had done, and settled down
for a brief time to the customary enjoyments of the rough when in town.
He spent his money, hired out as a Danite, killed a couple of men whom
the Mormons wanted removed, and soon got so bad that he had to leave.
Once more he headed west to California, and once more he started back
north from San Francisco, for reasons satisfactory to himself. While in
California, as was later learned, he undertook to rob and kill a man at
an outlying ranch, who had taken him in and befriended him when he was
in need and in flight from vengeance. He showed no understanding of the
feeling of gratitude, no matter what was done for him or how great was
his own extremity.
In Oregon Helm went back to robbery as his customary means of support,
and he killed several men at this time of his life, how many will never
be known. In 1862, as the mountain placers were now beginning to draw
the crowds of mining men, it was natural that Boone Helm should show up
at Florence. Here he killed a man in cold blood, in treachery, while his
enemy was not armed, and after their quarrel had been compromised. This
victim was Dutch Fred, a man of reputation as a fighter, but he had
never offended Helm, who killed him at the instigation of an enemy of
his victim, and possibly for hire. He shot Fred while the latter stood
looking him in the face, unarmed, and, missing him with the first shot,
took deliberate aim with the second and murdered his man in cold blood.
This was pretty bad even for Florence, and he had to leave. That fall he
turned up far to the north, on the Fraser river, in British Columbia.
Here he was once more reduced to danger on a starving foot march in the
wilderness, and here, once more, he was guilty of eating the body of
his companion, whom he is supposed to have slain. He was sent back by
the British authorities, and for a time was held at Portland, Oregon,
for safe keeping. Later he was tried at Florence for killing Dutch Fred,
but the witnesses had disappeared, and people had long ago lost interest
in the crime by reason of others more recent. Helm escaped justice and
was supposed to have gone to Texas; but he soon appeared in the several
settlements which have been mentioned in the foregoing pages, and moved
from one to the other. He killed many more men, how many in all was
never known.
The courage and hardihood of Boone Helm were in evidence to the close of
his life. Three men of the Vigilantes did the dangerous work of
arresting him, and took him by closing in on him as he stood in the
street talking. "If I'd had a chance," said he, "or if I had guessed
what you all were up to, you'd never have taken me." He claimed not to
know what was wanted of him when brought before the judges of the
Vigilante court, and solemnly declared that he had never killed a man in
all his life! They made him kiss the Bible and swear to this over again
just to see to what lengths his perjured and depraved soul would go. He
swore on the Bible with perfect calmness! His captors were not moved by
this, and indeed Helm was little expectant that they would be. He called
aside one of them whom he knew, declined a clergyman, and confessed to a
murder or so in Missouri and in California, admitted that he had been
imprisoned once or twice, but denied that he had been a road agent. He
accused some of his warmest friends of the latter crime. Jack Gallegher,
also under arrest, heard him thus incriminate himself and others of the
gang and called him all the names in the calendar, telling him he ought
to die.
"I have looked at death in all forms," said Helm, coolly, "and I am not
afraid to die." He then asked for a glass of whiskey, as did a good many
of these murderers when they were brought to the gallows. From that time
on he was cool and unconcerned, and showed a finish worthy of one
ambitious to be thought wholly bad.
There were six thousand men assembled in Virginia City to see the
executions of these criminals, who were fast being rounded up and hung
by the citizens. The place of execution was in a half-finished log
building. The ropes were passed over the ridge-pole, and, as the front
of the building was open, a full view was offered of the murderers as
they stood on the boxes arranged for the drops. Boone Helm looked around
at his friends placed for death, and told Jack Gallegher to "stop making
such a fuss." "There's no use being afraid to die," said he; and indeed
there probably never lived a man more actually devoid of all sense of
fear. He valued neither the life of others nor his own. He saw that the
end had come, and was careless about the rest. He had a sore finger,
which was tied up, and this seemed to trouble him more than anything
else. There was some delay about the confessions and the last offices of
those who prayed for the condemned, and this seemed to irritate Boone
Helm.
"For God's sake," said he, "if you're going to hang me, I want you to do
it and get through with it. If not, I want you to tie up my finger for
me."
"Give me that overcoat of yours, Jack," he said to Gallegher, as the
latter was stripped for the noose.
"You won't need it now," replied Gallegher, who was dying blasphemous.
About then, George Lane, one of the line of men about to be hung,
jumped off his box on his own account. "There's one gone to hell,"
remarked Boone Helm, philosophically. Gallegher was hanged next, and as
he struggled his former friend watched him calmly. "Kick away, old
fellow," said Boone Helm. Then, as though suddenly resolved to end it,
he commented, "My turn next. I'll be in hell with you in a minute!"
Boone Helm was a Confederate and a bitter one, and this seems to have
remained with him to the last. "Every man for his principles!" he
shouted. "Hurrah for Jeff Davis! Let her rip!" He sprang off the box;
and so he finished, utterly hard and reckless to the last.
Chapter IX
Death Scenes of Desperadoes--_How Bad Men Died_--_The Last Moments of
Desperadoes Who Finished on the Scaffold_--_Utterances of Terror, of
Defiance, and of Cowardice_.
There is always a grim sort of curiosity regarding the way in which
notoriously desperate men meet their end; and perhaps this is as natural
as is the curiosity regarding the manner in which they lived. "Did he
die game?" is one of the questions asked by bad men among themselves.
"Did he die with his boots on?" is another. The last was the test of
actual or, as it were, of professional badness. One who admitted himself
bad was willing to die with his boots on. Honest men were not, and more
than one early Western man fatally shot had his friends take off his
boots before he died, so that he might not go with the stain of
desperadoism attached to his name.
Some bad men died unrepentant and defiant. Others broke down and wept
and begged. A great oblivion enshrouds most of these utterances, for few
Vigilante movements ever reached importance enough to permit those who
participated to make publicly known their own participation in them.
Indeed, no man ever concerned in a law and order execution ever liked to
talk about it. Tradition, however, has preserved the exact utterances of
many bad men. Report is preserved, in a general way, of many of the
rustlers hung by the cattle men in the "regulator" movement in Montana,
Wyoming, and Nebraska in the late '70's. "Give me a chew of tobacco,
folks," said one. "Meet you in hell, fellows," remarked others of these
rustlers when the last moment arrived. "So-long, boys," was a not
infrequent remark as the noose tightened. Many of these men were brave,
and some of them were hung for what they considered no crime.
Henry Plummer, whose fate has been described in a previous chapter, was
one of those who died in a sense of guilt and terror. His was a nature
of some sensitiveness, not callous like that of Boone Helm. Plummer
begged for life on any terms, asked the Vigilantes to cut off his
ears and hands and tongue, anything to mark him and leave him helpless,
but to leave him alive. He protested that he was too wicked to die, fell
on his knees, cried aloud, promised, besought. On the whole, his end
hardly left him enshrouded with much glamor of courage; although the
latter term is relative in the bad man, who might be brave at one time
and cowardly at another, as was often proved.
[Illustration: THE 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 told him 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 say good-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 drank a
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 the Vigilantes. "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!"
Chapter X
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";
while countless 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 that sort 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 charge of 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 turned up 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. His whole 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 had been 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.
Chapter XI
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 to themselves 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 share it 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 of miles, 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, and _vice
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 common custom, common custom made common law, and common law made
statutory law."[E]
[Footnote E: "The Story of the Cowboy," by E. Hough. D. Appleton & Co.
New York.]
The old _fierro_ or iron mark of the Spanish cattle owner, and his
_venta_ or 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 the _venta_, or brand indicating the sale of an animal to another
owner, began to complicate matters to a certain extent. A purchaser
could put his own _fierro_ brand 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. Sometimes they
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 his saddle 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
range and 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 cattle stolen 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.
[Footnote F: "The Story of the Cowboy." By E. Hough. D. Appleton & Co.]
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, for the 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."
Such, then, was the burglar of the range, the rustler, to whom most of
the mysterious and untraceable 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.
[Illustration: HOW THE RUSTLER WORKED
The above plate illustrates the manner in which cow-brands were changed.
The original brand a
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