The Story of the Outlaw Part 7

A third time Curtis sent Bill back into the Confederate lines, this time into another part of Price's army. Here he was detected and arrested as a spy. Bound hand and foot in his death watch, he killed his captor after he had torn his hands free, and once more escaped. After that, he dared not go back again, for he was too well known and too difficult to disguise. He could not keep out of the fighting, however, and went as a scout and free lance with General Davis, during Price's second invasion of Missouri. He was not an enlisted man, and seems to have done pretty much as he liked. One day he rode out on his own hook, and was stopped by three men, who ordered him to halt and dismount. All three men had their hands on their revolvers; but, to show the difference between average men and a specialist, Bill killed two of them and fatally shot the other before they could get into action. His tally was now sixty-six men at least.

Curtis now sent Bill out into Kansas to look into a report that some Indians were about to join the Confederate forces. Bill got the news, and also engaged in a knife duel with the Sioux, Conquering Bear, whom he accused of trying to ambush him. It was a fair and desperate fight, with knives, and although Bill finally killed his man, he himself was so badly cut up that he came near dying, his arm being ripped from shoulder to elbow, a wound which it took years to mend. It is doubtful if any man ever survived such injuries as he did, for by this time he was a ma.s.s of scars from pistol and knife wounds. He had probably been in danger of his life more than a hundred times in personal difficulties; for the man with a reputation as a bad man has a reputation which needs continual defending.

After the war, Bill lived from hand to mouth, like most frontier dwellers. It was at Springfield, Missouri, that another duel of his long list occurred, in which he killed Dave Tutt, a fine pistol shot and a man with social ambitions in badness. It was a fair fight in the town square by appointment. Bill killed his man and wheeled so quickly on Tutt's followers that Tutt had not had time to fall before Bill's six-shooter was turned the opposite way, and he was asking Tutt's friends if they wanted any of it themselves. They did not. This fight was forced on Bill, and his quiet attempts to avoid it and his stern way of accepting it, when inevitable, won him high estimation on the border.

Indeed, he was now known all over the country, and his like has not since been seen. He was still a splendid looking man, and as cool and quiet and modest as ever he had been.

Bill now went to trapping in the less settled parts of Nebraska, and for a while he lived in peace, until he fell into a saloon row over some trivial matter and invited four of his opponents outside to fight him with pistols; the four were to fire at the word, and Bill to do the same--his pistol against their four. In this fight he killed one man at first fire, but he himself was shot through the shoulder and disabled in his right arm. He killed two more with his left hand and badly wounded the other. This was a fair fight also, and the only wonder is he was not killed; but he seemed never to consider odds, and literally he knew nothing but fight.

His score was now seventy-two men, not counting Indians. He himself never reported how many Indians he and Buffalo Bill killed as scouts in the Black Kettle campaign under Carr and Primrose, but the killing of Black Kettle himself was sometimes attributed to Wild Bill. The latter was badly wounded in the thigh with a lance, and it took a long time for this wound to heal. To give this hurt and others better opportunity for mending, Bill now took a trip back East to his home in Illinois. While East he found that he had a reputation, and he undertook to use it. He found no way of making a living, however, and he returned to the West, where he could better market his qualifications.

At that time Hays City, Kansas, was one of the hardest towns on the frontier. It had more than a hundred gambling dives and saloons to its two thousand population, and murder was an ordinary thing. Hays needed a town marshal, and one who could shoot. Wild Bill was unanimously selected, and in six weeks he was obliged to kill Jack Strawhan for trying to shoot him. This he did by reason of his superior quickness with the six-shooter, for Strawhan was drawing first. Another bad man, Mulvey, started to run Hays, in whose peace and dignity Bill now felt a personal ownership. Covered by Mulvey's two revolvers, Bill found room for the lightning flash of time, which is all that is needed by the real revolver genius, and killed Mulvey on the spot. His tally was now seventy-five men. He made it seventy-eight in a fight with a bunch of private soldiers, who called him a "long-hair"--a term very accurate, by the way, for Bill was proud of his long, blond hair, as was General Custer and many another man of the West at that time. In this fight, Bill was struck by seven pistol b.a.l.l.s and barely escaped alive by flight to a ranch on the prairie near by. He lay there three weeks, while General Phil Sheridan had details out with orders to get him dead or alive. He later escaped in a box-car to another town, and his days as marshal of Hays were over.

Bill now tried his hand at Wild West theatricals, seeing that already many Easterners were "daffy," as he called it, about the West; but he failed at this, and went back once more to the plains where he belonged.

He was chosen marshal of Abilene, then the cow camp par excellence of the middle plains, and as tough a community as Hays had been.

The wild men from the lower plains, fighting men, mad from whiskey and contact with the settlements' possibilities of long-denied indulgence, swarmed in the streets and dives, mingling with desperadoes and toughs from all parts of the frontier. Those who have never lived in such a community will never be able by any description to understand its phenomena. It seems almost unbelievable that sober, steady-going America ever knew such days; but there they were, and not so long ago, for this was only 1870.

Two days after Bill was elected marshal of Abilene, he killed a desperado who was "whooping-up" the town in customary fashion. That same night, he was on the street, in a dim light, when all at once he saw a man whisk around a corner, and saw something shine, as he thought, with the gleam of a weapon. As showing how quick were the hand and eye of the typical gun-man of the day, it may be stated that Bill killed this man in a flash, only to find later that it was a friend, and one of his own deputies. The man was only pulling a handkerchief from his pocket. Bill knew that he was watched every moment by men who wanted to kill him. He had his life in his hands all the time. For instance, he had next to kill the friend of the desperado whom he had shot. By this time, Abilene respected its new marshal; indeed, was rather proud of him. The reign of the bad man of the plains was at its height, and the professional man-killer, the specialist with firearms, was a figure here and there over wide regions. Among all these none compared with this unique specimen. He was generous, too, as he was deadly, for even yet he was supporting a McCandlas widow, and he always furnished funerals for his corpses. He had one more to furnish soon. Enemies down the range among the cow men made up a purse of five thousand dollars, and hired eight men to kill the town marshal and bring his heart back South. Bill heard of it, and literally made all of them jump off the railroad train where he met them. One was killed in the jump. His list of homicides was now eighty-one. He had never yet been arrested for murder, and his killing was in fair open fight, his life usually against large odds. He was a strange favorite of fortune, who seemed certainly to shield him round-about.

Bill now went East for another try at theatricals, in which, happily, he was unsuccessful, and for which he felt a strong distaste. He was scared--on the stage; and when he saw what was expected of him he quit and went back once more to the West. He appeared at Cheyenne, in the Black Hills, wandering thus from one point to another after the fashion of the frontier, where a man did many things and in many places. He had a little brush with a band of Indians, and killed four of them with four shots from his six-shooter, bringing his list in red and white to eighty-five men. He got away alive from the Black Hills with difficulty; but in 1876 he was back again at Deadwood, married now, and, one would have thought, ready to settle down.

But the life of turbulence ends in turbulence. He who lives by the sword dies by the sword. Deadwood was as bad a place as any that could be found in the mining regions, and Bill was not an officer here, as he had been in Kansas towns. As marshal of Hays and Abilene and United States marshal later at Hays City, he had been a national character. He was at Deadwood for the time only plain Wild Bill, handsome, quiet, but ready for anything.

Ready for anything but treachery! He himself had always fought fair and in the open. His men were shot in front. Not such was to be his fate. On the day of August 2, 1876, while he was sitting at a game of cards in a saloon, a hard citizen by name of Jack McCall slipped up behind him, placed a pistol to the back of his head, and shot him dead before he knew he had an enemy near. The ball pa.s.sed through Bill's head and out at the cheek, lodging in the arm of a man across the table.

Bill had won a little money from McCall earlier in the day, and won it fairly, but the latter had a grudge, and was no doubt one of those disgruntled souls who "had it in" for all the rest of the world. He got away with the killing at the time, for a miners' court let him go. A few days later, he began to boast about his act, seeing what fame was his for ending so famous a life; but at Yankton they arrested him, tried him before a real court, convicted him, and hanged him promptly.

Wild Bill's body was buried at Deadwood, and his grave, surrounded by a neat railing and marked by a monument, long remained one of the features of Deadwood. The monument and fence were disfigured by vandals who sought some memento of the greatest bad man ever in all likelihood seen upon the earth. His tally of eighty-five men seems large, but in fair probability it is not large enough. His main encounters are known historically. He killed a great many Indians at different times, but of these no accurate estimate can be claimed. Nor is his list of victims as a sharpshooter in the army legitimately to be added to his record.

Cutting out all doubtful instances, however, there remains no doubt that he killed between twenty and thirty men in personal combat in the open, and that never once was he tried in any court on a charge even of manslaughter.

This record is not approached by that of any other known bad man. Many of them are credited with twenty men, a dozen men, and so forth; but when the records are sifted the list dwindles. It is doubted whether any other bad man in America ever actually killed twenty men in fair personal combat. Bill was not killed in fair fight, nor could McCall have hurt him had Bill suspected his intent.

Hickok was about thirty-nine years old when killed, and he had averaged a little more than two men for each year of his entire life. He was well-known among army officers, and esteemed as a scout and a man, never regarded as a tough in any sense. He was a man of singular personal beauty. Of him General Custer, soon thereafter to fall a victim himself upon the plains, said: "He was a plainsman in every sense of the word, yet unlike any other of his cla.s.s. Whether on foot or on horseback, he was one of the most perfect types of physical manhood I ever saw. His manner was entirely free from all bl.u.s.ter and bravado. He never spoke of himself unless requested to do so. His influence among the frontiersmen was unbounded; his word was law. Wild Bill was anything but a quarrelsome man, yet none but himself could enumerate the many conflicts in which he had been engaged."

These are the words of one fighting man about another, and both men are ent.i.tled to good rank in the annals of the West. The praise of an army general for a man of no rank or wealth leaves us feeling that, after all, it was a possible thing for a bad man to be a good man, and worthy of respect and admiration, utterly unmingled with maudlin sentiment or weak love for the melodramatic.

Chapter XIII

Frontier Wars--_Armed Conflicts of Bodies of Men on the Frontiers_--_Political Wars; Town Site Wars; Cattle Wars_--_Factional Fights_.

The history of the border wars on the American frontier, where the fighting was more like battle than murder, and where the extent of the crimes against law became too large for the law ever to undertake any settlement, would make a long series of b.l.o.o.d.y volumes. These wars of the frontier were sometimes political, as the Kansas anti-slavery warfare; or, again, they were fights over town sites, one armed band against another, and both against the law. Wars over cows, as of the cattle men against the rustlers and "little fellows," often took on the phase of large armed bodies of men meeting in b.l.o.o.d.y encounter; though the bloodiest of these wars are those least known, and the _opera bouffe_ wars those most widely advertised.

The state of Kansas, now so calm and peaceful, is difficult to picture as the scene of a general bloodshed; yet wherever you scratch Kansas history you find a fight. No territory of equal size has had so much war over so many different causes. Her story in Indian fighting, gambler fighting, outlaw fighting, town site fighting, and political fighting is one not approached by any other portion of the West; and if at times it was marked with fanaticism or with sordidness, it was none the less bitter and notable.

The border wars of Kansas and Missouri at the time immediately preceding the civil war would be famed in song and story, had not the greater conflict between North and South wiped all that out of memory. Even the North was divided over the great question of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Alabama, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia gave a whole or a majority vote for this repeal of the Compromise. Against the repeal were Connecticut, Maine, Ma.s.sachusetts, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin.

Illinois and New Jersey voted a tie vote. Ohio cast four votes for the repeal measure, seventeen against it.

This vote brought the territories of Kansas and Nebraska into the Union with the option open on whether or not they should have slavery: "it being the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate slavery into any territory, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their own domestic inst.i.tutions in their own way."

That was very well; but who were "the people" of these debated grounds?

Hundreds of abolitionists of the North thought it their duty to flock to Kansas and take up arms. Hundreds of the inhabitants of Missouri thought it inc.u.mbent upon them to run across the line and vote in Kansas on the "domestic inst.i.tutions"; and to shoot in Kansas and to burn and ravage in Kansas. They were met by the anti-slavery legions along the wide frontier, and brother slew brother for years, one series of more or less ign.o.ble and dastardly outrages following another in big or little, murders and arson in big or little, until the whole country at last was drawn into this matter of the domestic inst.i.tutions of "bleeding Kansas." The animosities formed in those days were bitter and enduring ones, and the more prominent figures on both sides were men marked for later slaughter. The civil war and the slavery question were fought out all over the West for ten years, even twenty years after the war was over. Some large figures came up out of this internecine strife, and there were many deeds of courage and many romantic adventures; but on the whole, although the result of all this was for the best, and added another state to the list unalterably opposed to human slavery, the story in detail is not a pleasant one, and adds no great glory to either side. It is a chapter of American history which is very well let alone.

When the railroads came across the Western plains, they brought a man who has been present on the American frontier ever since the revolutionary war,--the land boomer. He was in Kentucky in time to rob poor old Daniel Boone of all the lands he thought he owned. He founded Marietta, on the Ohio river, on a land steal; and thence, westward, laid out one town after another. The early settler who came down the Ohio valley in the first and second decades of the past century pa.s.sed the ruins of abandoned towns far back to the east even in that day. The town-site shark pa.s.sed across the Mississippi river and the Missouri, and everywhere his record was the same. He was the pioneer of avarice in very many cases, and often he inaugurated strife where he purported to be establishing law. Each town thought itself the garden spot and center of the universe--one knows not how many Kansas towns, for instance, contended over the absurd honor of being exactly at the center of the United States!--and local pride was such that each citizen must unite with others even in arms, if need be, to uphold the merits of his own "city."

This peculiar phase of frontier nature usually came most into evidence over the questions of county seats. Hardly a frontier county seat was ever established without a fight of some kind, and often a b.l.o.o.d.y one.

It has chanced that the author has been in and around a few of these clashes between rival towns, and he may say that the vehemence of the antagonism of such encounters would have been humorous, had it not been so deadly. Two "cities," composed each of a few frame shanties and a set of blue-print maps, one just as barren of delight as the other, and neither worth fighting over at the time, do not seem typical of any great moral purpose; yet at times their citizens fought as stubbornly as did the men who fought for and against slavery in Kansas. One instance of this sort of thing will do, and it is covered in the chapter describing the Stevens County War, one of the most desperate and b.l.o.o.d.y, as well as one of the most recent feuds of local politicians.

For some reason, perhaps that of remoteness of time, the wars of the cow men of the range seem to have had a bolder, a less sordid and more romantic interest, if these terms be allowable. When the cow man began to fence up the free range, to shut up G.o.d's out-of-doors, he intrenched upon more than a local or a political pride. He was now infringing upon the great principle of personal freedom. He was throttling the West itself, which had always been a land of freedom. One does not know whether all one's readers have known it, that unspeakable feeling of freedom, of independence, of rebellion at restraint, which came when one could ride or drive for days across the empire of the plains and never meet a fence to hinder, nor need a road to show the way. To meet one of these new far-flung fences of the rich men who began to take up the West was at that time only to cut it and ride on. The free men of the West would not be fenced in. The range was theirs, so they blindly and lovingly thought. Let those blame them who love this day more than that.

But the fence was the sign of the property-owning man; and the property-owning man has always beaten the nomad and the restless man at last, and set metes and bounds for him to observe. The nesters and rustlers fought out the battle for the free range more fiercely than was ever generally known.

One of the most widely known of these cow wars was the absurd Johnson County War, of Wyoming, which got much newspaper advertising at the time--the summer of 1892--and which was always referred to with a certain contempt among old-timers as the "dude war." Only two men were killed in this war, and the non-resident cattle men who undertook to be ultra-Western and do a little vigilante work for themselves among the rustlers found that they were not fit for the task. They were very glad indeed to get themselves arrested and under cover, more especially in the protection of the military. They found that they had not lost any rustlers when they stirred up a whole valley full and were themselves besieged, surrounded, and well-nigh ready for a general wiping out. They killed a couple of "little fellows," or, rather, some of their hired Texas cowboys did it for them, but that was all they accomplished, except well-nigh to bankrupt Wyoming in the legal muddle, out of which, of course, nothing came. There were in this party of cattle men a member of the legislature, a member of the stock commission, some two dozen wealthy cattle men, two Harvard graduates, and a young Englishman in search of adventure. They made, on the whole, about the most contemptible and inefficient band of vigilantes that ever went out to regulate things, although their deeds were reported by wire to many journals, and for a time perhaps they felt that they were cutting quite a figure. They had very large property losses to incite them to their action, for the rustlers were then pretty much running things in that part of Wyoming, and the local courts would not convict them. This fiasco scarcely hastened the advent of the day--which came soon enough after the railroads and the farmers--under which the home dweller outweighed the nomad.[G]

[Footnote G: See "The Story of the Cowboy," by E. Hough. D. Appleton & Co.]

Wars between sheep men and cattle men sometimes took on the phase of armed bodies of men meeting in b.l.o.o.d.y encounter. The sheep were always unwelcome on the range, and are so to-day, although the courts now adjust such matters better than they formerly did. The cow baron and his men often took revenge upon the woolly nuisances themselves and killed them in numbers. The author knows of one instance where five thousand sheep were killed in one box canon by irate cow men whose range had been invaded. The sheep eat the gra.s.s down to the point of killing it, and cattle will not feed on a country which sheep have crossed. Many wars of this kind have been known all the way from Montana to Mexico.

Again, factional fights might arise over some trivial matter as an immediate cause, in a community or a region where numbers of men fairly equal were separated in self-interest. In a day when life was still wild and free, and when the law was still unknown, these differences of opinion sometimes led to bitter and b.l.o.o.d.y conflicts between factions.

Chapter XIV

The Lincoln County War--_The Bloodiest, Most Dramatic and Most Romantic of all the Border Wars_--_First Authentic Story Ever Printed of the Bitterest Feud of the Southwest_.

The entire history of the American frontier is one of rebellion against the law, if, indeed, that may be called rebellion whose apostles have not yet recognized any authority of the law. The frontier antedated anarchy. It broke no social compact, for it had never made one. Its population asked no protection save that afforded under the stern suzerainty of the six-shooter. The anarchy of the frontier, if we may call it such, was sometimes little more than self-interest against self-interest. This was the true description of the border conflict now in question.

The Lincoln County War, fully speaking, embraced three wars; the Pecos War of the early '70's, the Harold War of 1874, and the Lincoln County War proper, which may be said to have begun in 1874 and to have ended in 1879. The actors in these different conflicts were all intermingled.

There was no blood feud at the bottom of this fighting. It was the war of self-interest against self-interest, each side supported by numbers of fighting men.

At that time Lincoln County, New Mexico, was about as large as the state of Pennsylvania. For judicial purposes it was annexed to Donna Ana County, and its territories included both the present counties of Eddy and Chaves, and part of what is now Donna Ana. It extended west practically as far the Rio Grande river, and embraced a tract of mountains and high tableland nearly two hundred miles square. Out of this mountain chain, to the east and southeast, ran two beautiful mountain streams, the Bonito and the Ruidoso, flowing into the Hondo, which continues on to the flat valley of the Pecos river--once the natural pathway of the Texas cattle herds bound north to Utah and the mountain territories, and hence the natural pathway also for many lawful or lawless citizens from Texas.

At the close of the civil war, Texas was full of unbranded and unowned cattle. Out of the town of Paris, Texas, which was founded by his father, came one John Chisum--one of the most typical cow men that ever lived. Bold, fearless, shrewd, unscrupulous, genial, magnetic, he was the man of all others to occupy a kingdom which had heretofore had no ruler.

John Chisum drove the first herds up the Pecos trail to the territorial market. He held at one time perhaps eighty thousand head of cattle under his brand of the "Long I" and "jinglebob." Moreover, he had powers of attorney from a great many cow men in Texas and lower New Mexico, authorizing him to take up any trail cattle which he found under their respective brands. He carried a tin cylinder, large as a water-spout, that contained, some said, more than a thousand of these powers of attorney. At least, it is certain he had papers enough to give him a wide authority. Chisum riders combed every north-bound herd. If they found the cattle of any of his "friends," they were cut out and turned on the Chisum range. There were many "little fellows," small cattlemen, nested here and there on the flanks of the Chisum herds. What more natural than that they should steal from him, in case they found a market of their own? That was much easier than raising cows of their own. Now, there was a market up this winding Bonito valley, at Lincoln and Fort Stanton. The soldiers of the latter post, and the Indians of the Mescalero reservation near by, needed supplies. There were others besides John Chisum who might need a beef contract now and then, and cattle to fill it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHN SIMPSON CHISUM A famous cattle king, died December 23, 1884]

At the end of the civil war, there was in New Mexico, with what was known as the California Column, which joined the forces of New Mexican volunteers, an officer known as Major L. G. Murphy. After the war, a great many men settled near the points where they were mustered out in the South and West. It was thus with Major Murphy, who located as post-trader at the little frontier post known as Fort Stanton, which was founded by Captain Frank Stanton in 1854, in the Indian days. John Chisum located his Bosque Grande ranch about 1865, and Murphy came to Fort Stanton about 1866. In 1875, Chisum dropped down to his South Spring River ranch, and by that time Murphy had been thrown out of the post-tradership by Major Clendenning, commanding officer, who did not like his methods. He had dropped nine miles down the Bonito from Fort Stanton, with two young a.s.sociates, under the firm name of Murphy, Riley & Dolan, sometimes spoken of as L. G. Murphy & Co.

Murphy was a hard-drinking man, yet withal something of a student. He was intelligent, generous, bold and shrewd. He "staked" every little cow man in Lincoln county, including a great many who hung on the flanks of John Chisum's herds. These men in turn were in their ethics bound to support him and his methods. Murphy was king of the Bonito country.

Chisum was king of the Pecos; not merchant but cow man, and caring for nothing which had not gra.s.s and water on it.