Wild Bill

by Tom Clavin

  Considering that in the weeks before there had been several murders, at least three lynchings (in addition to the one in January), and numerous brawls between civilians and soldiers stationed at Fort Hays, the sheriff may simply have thrown his hands up and escaped while he could. Another possibility is that some prominent residents, appalled by the escalating violence, had formed a Vigilance Committee, headed by Alonzo Webster.2 The committee, seeing how ineffectual Thayer was, may have pressed upon him a one-way ticket out of town, then endorsed the petition to the governor.

  But Harvey balked at becoming involved in the circus of mayhem that was Hays City. He contended he did not have the authority to appoint a sheriff and that it was up to Hays City residents to elect one. The problem was, the next election was not until November, and no one knew how to go about scheduling one earlier. Plus, who would want to be in Thayer’s boots? Then the answer ambled into town: Wild Bill Hickok. That July, he became marshal of Hays City.

  There has long been confusion about how legitimate a peace officer Hickok was there. It seems that initially he was the marshal because the desperate Vigilance Committee said he was, an action that had no official stamp to it. Hickok served as marshal with this dubious imprimatur for a few weeks. Then, The Leavenworth Times and Conservative reported that an election had been held in Hays City on August 23 and Hickok had been voted in as sheriff of Ellis County. In essence, he held two law-enforcement offices at once. The governor, finally doing something, declared that Hickok’s status was illegal, but this time, no one paid attention to him.

  Just as well, because by then, Hickok had already been quite busy, as there was no lack of lawing to be done in Hays City in the summer of 1869. On July 23, Samuel Strawhun,3 one of the city’s residents who had unsuccessfully petitioned Governor Harvey, accompanied by Deputy U.S. Marshal Joe Weiss, walked into a store owned by Richard Evans and there encountered Webster. Whatever the confrontation was about, Webster felt threatened enough that he pulled out a pistol and shot and killed Weiss as Strawhun fled. Webster and the store owner went outside to summon members of the Vigilance Committee to assist if Strawhun returned with reinforcements.

  One of those answering the call was Hickok. Once inside Evans’s store, he pointed to his two Navy Colts and said, “Let them come. We are ready for them.” It would appear that the death of the unfortunate deputy marshal was not avenged and Webster did not even see the inside of a courtroom. (Possibly, Hickok informed Marshal Houston that he would take care of the situation—which he ended up doing.) One of the challenges Hays City had at the time was the lack of even a rudimentary justice system. Hickok could keep busy rounding up rowdy cowboys and others breaking the few laws the city had, but not much happened after that. As one newspaper account put it, “If Wild Bill arrests an offender, there is a log jail to receive him, but no justice to try the case.”

  Nevertheless, Hickok had little spare time to enjoy the gambling and other pleasures of Hays City. He was fine with those who did, as long as they did it without fighting, especially gunplay. Every night, when he interrupted the activities of lawbreakers, Hickok offered them three courses of action. One was to head over to the train station and get on the first eastbound that arrived. The second was to take the first westbound train out of Hays City. The third was to “go north in the morning.” The cemetery was to the north, and the miscreant knew that if he hadn’t left town by then, Wild Bill would come gunning for him. No surprise that the railroad’s business in Hays City increased, and the marshal saved money on bullets.

  Sometimes, just a piece of wood was enough to keep the peace … and generate a few laughs. Simon Motz, a future Kansas state senator—and, ironically, a supporter of Hickok and his aggressive efforts—owned a shop in the middle of town. One night, he went to reopen the front door and realized he had forgotten his key. Motz pried open a window, stepped inside, got what he’d come for, and was on his way back out the window when a board connected with his head. When Motz came to, there was the marshal looming over him. Hickok was a tad embarrassed about capturing the “burglar.”

  There is always at least one in every crowd, however, who is not big on law and order, and in Hays City, it was Bill Mulvey. Some men are driven mad by alcohol, and one night in September, it was Mulvey’s turn. Liquored up, the Missouri man—whom the press described as an “intoxicated rough”—went on a rampage that included staggering from one saloon to another and shooting up whiskey bottles, lamps, and mirrors. When warned that the marshal was on his way, Mulvey declared that he “had come to kill Wild Bill Hickok.” This caused some alarm because Miguel Otero, one of the witnesses to what followed, knew of Mulvey as “a handy man with a gun.”

  That opportunity presented itself when Mulvey was en route to the next saloon, this time atop a horse and with a cocked rifle in hand. When he rounded the corner, Hickok could have shot Mulvey on sight, but for some reason—not a very prudent one—he waved at the rider, perhaps trying to calm him down. The roaring-drunk Mulvey was not inclined to be calmed. Hickok then called out, “Don’t shoot him in the back, he’s drunk.”

  Fearing a bullet from that direction, Mulvey wheeled his horse around. He glanced this way and that, the rifle ready. Probably realizing it was a ruse, he was in the process of turning back and finishing his business with the marshal when Wild Bill whipped out one of his pistols and jerked the trigger. Shot through the temple, Mulvey died instantly.

  He would not be the last man Marshal Hickok killed to keep the peace. It would later be attributed to him that he said, “There is no Sunday west of Junction City, no law west of Hays City, and no God west of Carson City.” If it took both of his Colt six-shooters, for as long as he wore a badge, Wild Bill would make sure that there was law in Hays City.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE MAN-KILLER

  The killing of Bill Mulvey sent a message, or perhaps a known gunfighter with a badge was message enough, because a reporter visiting Hays City wrote back to readers of The Topeka Commonwealth that the city “under the guardian care of Wild Bill Hickok is quiet and doing well.”

  Apparently, Hickok believed that dressing well would enhance his peacekeeping efforts. He patrolled the streets not only well armed, with a sawed-off shotgun complementing his Colt six-shooters, but also attired as fine as any Hays City leading citizen. Another reporter, this one having been dispatched by The St. Louis Republican, included in his article a description of Hickok that had not changed from ones written the last few years (“In physique he is as perfect a specimen of manhood as ever walked in moccasins”). But he added a few details that reflected the impression the marshal made on his new jurisdiction: “Bill is a dandy at all times in attire—a regular frontier dude.… There is nothing in his appearance to betoken the dead shot and frequent man-killer, except his tread. He walks like a tiger and, aroused, he is as ferocious and pitiless as one.”

  Because trouble could occur at any moment, during his lawman stint in Hays City, Hickok sometimes went on patrol on horseback, the better to see his surroundings from a higher vantage point. When on foot, adhering to his previous practice, he strolled in the middle of the street rather than on the wooden sidewalks. If someone was foolish or ambitious enough to jump him, Hickok wanted to see him coming.

  The St. Louis scribe informed his readers about such a confrontation that demonstrated that even with precautions, the sheriff’s life hung on a slender thread. Hickok was patrolling an unsavory section of the city—such sections at that time were in the majority—when a short man known as Sullivan suddenly appeared in the street brandishing a pistol. For some reason, he aimed to harm Hickok. “I’ve got you. Hold up your hands!” Sullivan shouted. “I’m going to kill you.”

  There may have been some newspaperman himself in Sullivan because the diminutive gunman began to compose out loud the type of article he expected would be published about the death of Wild Bill. Onlookers were gathering, and Sullivan regaled them with increasingly colorful adjectives. His f
atal mistake was not only forgetting who his intended victim was but forgetting him altogether. Hickok stood still, his eyes gazing at the loquacious gunman, but his hand slowly crept toward his right holster. Sullivan was between one syllable and the next when he died.

  As Hickok put his pistol away, he remarked to the crowd, “He talked his life away.”

  As if keeping the peace in Hays City weren’t handful enough, Hickok doubled as a sort of one-man employment agency. There are enough tales of him helping young men find jobs that at least a few must be true. One of them came from Harry Young, who many years later wrote about his first encounter with Hickok, in Hays City.1 He had come to town with $40 in his pockets. By the end of a night’s entertainments, Young was left with $1.50.

  Rather morosely, he was swaying on the sidewalk when he felt a tap on the shoulder. “I turned and found myself face-to-face with the finest-looking man I have ever seen or expect to see,” Young recalled. He noted the “long auburn hair and clear blue eyes—eyes that showed kindness and friendship to all except the evil-doer, to whom they meant the reverse.”

  In answer to the lawman’s question, Young explained that he had just frittered away his pay from a construction job, and now being pretty much broke, he hoped to find work in Hays City. Hickok told him there were jobs hauling freight for men who could drive a six-mule team and could tie “a government ham-string.” Hickok taught him this knot and told him to meet him the next morning. Young did, and the two rode out to Fort Hays.

  According to Young’s recollection: “There we met the corral boss, and Wild Bill asked him to put me to work.” After demonstrating that he could tie the ham-string knot and passing a few other rudimentary tests, Young was hired. He worked the job for six months to get back on his feet and “saw a great deal of Wild Bill.” After Hickok moved on from Hays City, he and Young would meet each other once more, in Deadwood.

  Sometime during his service as a lawman in Hays City, Hickok met a man who would later play a role in his “career” as a stage actor. John Omohundro was born in July 1846 in Palmyra, Virginia. He was just seventeen when he enlisted in the Confederate army, and until the war ended, he served in the Fifth Cavalry Corps commanded by J. E. B. Stuart. After the surrender, rather than return to his family in Virginia, Omohundro set off for Texas, where he spent three years as a cowboy in a reviving cattle industry. During one drive into Tennessee, he acquired the nickname “Texas Jack.”

  Late in the summer of 1869, Omohundro was at Fort Hays, where he met California Joe, who in turn introduced him to Wild Bill Hickok. Moses Embree “California Joe” Milner was a veteran plainsman and scout who had crossed paths with Hickok several times. When George Armstrong Custer had been assigned to the West after the Civil War, Milner looked like a good candidate to lead a new unit of civilian scouts. “He was a man about 40 years of age, maybe older, over 6 feet in height and possessing a well-proportioned frame,” the lieutenant colonel wrote in My Life on the Plains. “His head was covered with a luxuriant crop of long, almost black hair, strongly inclined to curl and so long as to fall carelessly over his shoulders. His face, at least so much of it as was not concealed by the long, waving brown beard and mustache, was full of intelligence and pleasant to look upon. His eye was undoubtedly handsome, black and lustrous with an expression of kindness and mildness combined.”

  Milner had been born in Kentucky in 1829 to parents who had emigrated from England. At fourteen, he ran away from home and in St. Louis joined a hunting and trapping expedition. He served with Brigadier General Stephen Kearny in the war with Mexico and returned to marry a thirteen-year-old, and the couple moved to California. Milner toiled as a prospector. When gold did not appear in his pan, he and his wife, Nancy, bought a ranch in Oregon and raised four children. He was known as a man of decisive action: when one of his horses was stolen, Milner tracked the thief down, shot him in the head, and left him on the side of a road with a note pinned to his coat warning other thieves the same fate awaited them.

  In the 1860s, he was on the move a lot because of his abilities as a scout and a handler of mules. In a saloon in Virginia City, Montana, when miners asked him where he was from, Milner responded, “I’m from California, where most of the gold is, and my name is Joe. That’s enough for you to know.” He was christened California Joe. He scouted for Custer and the Seventh Cavalry for close to a decade. In the 1941 film They Died with Their Boots On, California Joe is portrayed by the character actor Charley Grapewin and is shown dying next to Errol Flynn’s Custer during the Battle of Little Bighorn. However, Milner was not on that expedition; he was prospecting in the Black Hills.

  After meeting up in Hays City that fall of 1869, Wild Bill, California Joe, and Texas Jack enjoyed each other’s company in the saloons, with the young Omohundro being an eager audience for the plainsmen’s tales of adventure on the prairie. When Texas Jack moved on sometime that autumn, he encountered Buffalo Bill. Cody was scouting for the Fifth U.S. Cavalry stationed at Fort McPherson in Nebraska. He invited Texas Jack to sign on, and the two became good friends. In their future was a production titled Scouts of the Plains, which would, improbably, feature Hickok as a member of the cast.

  When that time came, it could be said that Hickok had some experience as a showman because, as he had done in previous stops, he enjoyed putting on shooting exhibitions. Most likely, there was a good public relations angle for such demonstrations—bad guys or even just rowdy cowboys had better think twice about carrying a weapon in town and risk being confronted by the marshal. But it also seems Hickok had fun awing onlookers.

  “I saw him draw his pistol in front of the old depot, throw it over his first finger, cocking it with his thumb as it came around and keep a tomato can jumping for a whole block down to Riley’s saloon on the next corner,” remembered Joe Hutt, a former buffalo hunter, about Hickok. “He was not a drunken, quarrelsome man-killer, but picturesque and a fine shot. It was not always the blustering bullies that were the bravest men in a western town.”

  Time for Jim Curry to reappear in these pages. Inevitably, as a patrolling peace officer, Hickok would come up against the dangerous desperado. Perhaps trying to spurn his violent past, by the fall of 1869, Curry was a fairly successful saloonkeeper. However, he still believed the law did not concern him. The marshal did not share that belief. In an article published in the June 15, 1913, edition of The Kansas City Star, C. J. Bascom, a young resident of Hays City forty-four years earlier, recalled that Hickok “was ruling the town with an iron hand. It was something unusual and unexpected. They did not know just what to think nor how long this rule would last.” Bascom himself witnessed what was almost the end.

  Curry, apparently, was outgoing and friendly when he was of a mind to be. On a lovely late-summer day when Bascom entered Curry’s establishment, the proprietor suggested they take a walk. When they came to a saloon owned by Tommy Drum, they decided to go in for lunch. When Curry spotted Hickok playing cards at a table at the back of the saloon, a switch was thrown. Remembering or imagining all kinds of slights, Curry snuck up behind Hickok, then pointed the barrel of his cocked pistol at his head. “Now, you son of a gun,” Curry whispered, “I’ve got you.”

  Enhancing his reputation of being fearless, Hickok remained still for several seconds, then, as if remarking on the weather, he said, “Jim, you would not murder a man without giving him a show.”

  “I’ll give you the same show you would give me,” Curry hissed, adding, “you long-haired tough.” (We can assume the newspaper version of this event was sanitized for general consumption.)

  Hickok considered this unpleasant option, then suggested, “Jim, let us settle this feud. How would a bottle of champagne all around do?”

  There was another shift in Curry’s brain because his reaction was to burst out laughing, and nervous onlookers followed suit. Drum began popping open pint bottles of bubbly. Hickok and Curry shook hands and poured a couple of glasses each down the hatch.

  Unfortunately,
the peaceful outcome to the confrontation with Jim Curry did not put an end to the killing in Hays City. The next man to take on Hickok was Samuel Strawhun, and this showdown had a much different ending.

  Only twenty-four in September 1869, Strawhun already had a reputation as a man-killer, though his actual occupation was cowboy. In Hays City, he’d already caused considerable trouble that summer, particularly his connection to the shooting death of the deputy U.S. marshal Joe Weiss. Yet Strawhun had been one of the men who had petitioned Governor Harvey to appoint a new sheriff of Ellis County. Still, his behavior was such that the Vigilance Committee had ordered him to leave. His response was to confront Alonzo Webster once again and this time to pistol-whip him, and no one had done anything about it. However, when Hickok was hired as marshal, Strawhun left town. There was a collective sigh of relief, and it was presumed he would not return to Hays City as long as Wild Bill patrolled its dusty streets.

  Thus, there was fear and disappointment when on the twenty-sixth of September, Strawhun was back and had brought eighteen cowboy colleagues with him. They didn’t care who was in charge; it was simply time to raise hell. They got off their horses and parked themselves in John Bitter’s Leavenworth Beer Saloon, determined to cause as much of a ruckus as they could while drinking it dry. Strawhun was heard to declare, “I’m going to kill someone tonight just for luck.”

  As The Leavenworth Times and Conservative would report, “It appears that Stranghan [sic] and a number of his companions being ‘wolfing’ all night, wished to conclude by cleaning out a beer saloon and breaking things generally. ‘Wild Bill’ was called upon to quiet them.”