by Jon E. Lewis
By his own account, Hardin then killed three soldiers (one a Negro) who pursued him. For these actions, Hardin was applauded ecstatically by the White racist, anti-Reconstruction bloc in Texas politics, who elevated him to the status of a hero. If not hired directly by the anti-Reconstructionists, Hardin certainly used his gun for their ends. More deaths of Blacks followed.
By 1871 the fugitive Hardin had taken to the life of a cowboy, driving the cattle of Columbus Carol up the trail to Abilene. There the youthful, lithe gunslinger encountered Wild Bill Hickok and reputedly faced him down. Others declare that Hardin shot a man in the American Hotel because his snoring disturbed him. Hickok moved to arrest the gunfighter, but Hardin escaped out of the window dressed only in his undershirt.
Returning to Texas, Hardin took a hand in the Sutton–Taylor feud which had long troubled DeWitt County. The origin of the feud is obscure, but latterly it had taken a political turn; the Sutton faction was generally pro-Reconstruction, the Taylors anti-Reconstruction. Naturally, Hardin sided with the latter and on 17 May 1873, in front of the blacksmith’s shop in Albuquerque, Texas, slew a prominent Sutton supporter, Captain Jack Helm. Although the shooting took place in front of a crowd of Helm’s friends, none felt brave enough to retaliate. Hardin wrote later: “The news soon spread that I had killed Jack Helms [sic] and I received many letters of thanks from the widows of the men whom he had cruelly put to death. Many of the best citizens of Gonzales and DeWitt counties patted me on the back and told me that it was the best act of my life.”
The most dramatic gunfighting exploit in Hardin’s life came a year later, in May 1874, in the wild Texas town of Comanche. After a day at the races, Hardin and deputy sheriff Charles Webb walked along the street to a saloon, Webb falsely procaliming friendship. When Hardin’s attention was momentarily distracted, Webb drew his gun and began pulling back the trigger. At speed almost beyond belief, Hardin jumped aside, drew, and put a bullet in Webb’s head, the latter’s shot only wounding the outlaw.
But the killing of Webb forced Hardin to flee Texas and take up a refugee life in Florida and Alabama. Captured by the Rangers at Pensacola Junction, Florida, Hardin was taken back to Texas and incarcerated at Huntsville. While in prison his adored wife died.
By the time of his release in 1892, Hardin was a changed, dispirited man. He had taught himself law in prison and opened a legal firm in El Paso, Texas, but clients (unsurprisingly) were few. Much of his time was spent in heavy drinking in local bars. It was in such an establishment, the Acme Saloon, that he was shot in the back of the head on the night of 19 August 1895. His assailant was John Selman, a local policeman and old-style Texas gunslinger, who probably shot Hardin for the fame of it.
Hardin was not the only outlaw-hero in the pantheon of Texan anti-Reconstructionists. There was also William P. Longley, who killed his first Black in 1866, when Longley was 15. Longley was not prosecuted, and after killing three more Blacks, he left his home at Evergreen and worked the West as a cowboy, gambler and teamster. He returned home in 1875 and murdered Wilson Anderson, who was suspected of killing his cousin. Although Longley fled to Louisiana, Texas lawmen crossed the border and brought him back to stand trial for the Anderson murder. He went to the gallows on 11 October 1878. Before putting his head in the noose, he looked at the 4,000-strong crowd and remarked, “I see a good many enemies and mighty few friends.” He had to be hung twice, for the first time he dropped his feet touched the ground.
Black Outlaws
But Blacks were not only on the receiving end of outlaw guns, they gave death and crime as well as taking it. Born into slavery in Arkansas in 1849, Isom Dart began his life in crime pilfering for Confederate officers during the Civil War. After the war he joined a young Mexican stealing cattle south of the border to sell in Texas, then transferred his rustling activity to rugged Brown’s Park, Colorado, a haven for cattle thieves. Periodically, Dart tried to “go straight” and earned a local reputation as bronc-buster, but always ended up back in the rustler’s saddle. On one notable occasion he was arrested by a Wyoming deputy sheriff who was then injured when his buckboard left the road. The uninjured Dart gathered up the horses, lifted the buckboard onto its wheels, loaded on the deputy and drove to the hospital at Rock Springs. There, Dart turned himself in at the town jail. The impressed officials immediately let him go. Local cattle barons were less impressed. Dart was assassinated in 1900, probably by the cattlemen’s hired killer, Tom Horn.
Cherokee Bill was a Black Billy the Kid, sharing with the latter a youthful impulsiveness, a love of guns, and a life cut short at the age of 21. Cherokee Bill was born Cranford Goldsby on the military reservation of Fort Concho, Texas, where his father was a buffalo soldier (as Black servicemen became known, on account of their wiry hair, which Indians said reminded them of the bison) in the famed 10th Cavalry. When the family split up and his mother remarried, the teenage Cranford was pushed out on his own and fell in with bad company. At 18 he had his first gunfight, wounding a middle-aged Black man who had beaten him with his fists. Afterwards, he roamed the Cherokee, Seminole and Creek Nations and joined the outlaw gang of Jim and Bill Cook. Unlike White outlaws, the Black Cherokee Bill (who also had Indian blood, hence the nickname) could travel Oklahoma’s Indian lands without interference, something which gave him a distinct advantage over the posses who pursued him for his persistent armed robberies of stores and railroads. Finally, at the age of 20 Cherokee Bill was caught and sentenced to die for murder (it was claimed that he had managed to kill 13 men in his two-year run, and Judge Parker called him an “inhuman monster”). On a fine day in 1896 Cherokee Bill was taken into the courtyard at Fort Smith to be hanged. Looking up at the sky he remarked, “This is about as good a day as any to die.” At the instruction of the guard he stood over the trap. Asked if he had any last words, Cherokee came out with one of the West’s best epitaphs: “I came here to die, not make a speech.”
Unlike Dart and Cherokee Bill, Dodge City Black outlaw Ben Hodges died of old age, expiring in 1929. Photographs show Hodges toting a shotgun, but he tended to rely on his wits and tongue above firearms. Arriving in the Kansas cowtown with a trail crew he heard a story about an unclaimed Spanish land grant, and promptly pretended to be from an old aristocratic Spanish family, the tract’s rightful owner. Residents of Dodge, and even total strangers, supported his claim. When this failed, he successfully swindled Dodge City National Bank and made the railroads believe he was a VIP, at which they gave him an annual free pass. Later charged with rustling a herd of cattle, he pleaded his own case. His two-hour summary was a masterpiece of theatre:
What me, the descendant of old grandees of Spain, the owner of a land grant embracing millions of acres, the owner of gold mines and villages and towns situated on that grant of which I am sole owner, to steal a miserable, miserly lot of old cows? Why, the idea is absurd. No gentlemen, I think too much of the race of men from which I sprang, to disgrace their memory.
On another occasion, Hodges – protesting profound Republican sympathies – asked the governor to appoint him to a job as a livestock inspector. As one rancher put it, this was “like a wolf asking to guard the sheep pen.” Needless to say, Hodges’s application was turned down. A few years later, vigilantes caught Hodges and charged him with rustling. Unable to find definite proof, they satisfied themselves with a precautionary severing of the tendons in both Hodges’s ankles, thus crippling him.
Only rarely did American Indians turn outlaw. A number so classed – like the Apache Kid – were more accurately renegades, men too full of independent spirit to submit to the confines of reservation life. But a few were unmistakably criminal, and several became lovers of “bandit queen” Myra Belle Shirley. These were Blue Duck, Sam Starr – whose name Belle took – and Jim July. All were horse thieves and robbers.
Another Indian outlaw, Ned Christie, served with the Cherokee tribal legislature, before a seven-year spree as an outlaw in the Oklahoma Territory. In 1892 Judge Parker’s deput
ies finally cornered him and two accomplices in a log fort in Tahlequah. To assail the fortress, marshals Heck Thomas and Paden Tolbert used an army cannon. Thirty rounds of artillery fire bounced off the log walls, as did 2,000 rounds from rifles. The exasperated lawmen were reduced to blowing off the side of the cabin with dynamite. Christie came out fighting and was shot dead. A victory photograph was taken of the dead Indian, propped up on a photographer’s board, with his rifle cradled in his arms.
For 13 days in 1895, the Creek gang of Rufus Buck went wild in Indian Territory, setting a criminal record exceeding that of more famous, White outlaws. The five teenagers began by shooting a Black deputy marshal, John Barrett, near Okmulgee, then raped two women, held up a stockman, killing the Black boy accompanying him, stole horses and committed several more hold-ups.
Their reign of terror ended on 10 August, when they were surrounded by marshals and a posse of Creek Light Horse (Creek police) in a grove outside of Muskogee. At the end of their trial before Judge Parker, the gang’s despondent state-appointed attorney entered the shortest defence on record: “May it please the court and gentlemen of the jury, you have heard the evidence. I have nothing to say.” The five – Rufus Buck, Maomi July, Sam Sampson, Luckey Davis and Lewis Davis – were hanged together on 1 July 1896.
When the hangman had finished, guards cleaning Buck’s cell found a picture of his mother with a poem written on the back:
I dreamt I was in Heaven
Among the Angels fair;
I’d ne’er seen none so handsome
That twine in golden hair.
They looked so neat and sang so sweet
And played the Golden Harp.
I was about to pick an angel out
And take her to my heart:
But the moment I began to plea,
I thought of you, my love.
There was none I’d seen so beautiful
On earth, or Heaven above.
Good by, my dear wife and Mother
Also my sister.
Yours truly
RUFUS BUCK
No explanation was ever advanced as to why Buck and his confederates went on their spree.
Buck was not the only poet outlaw. Stagecoach robber Charles E. Bole, alias “Black Bart”, liked to leave poems at the scene of his crimes, one of which read:
I’ve labored long and hard for bread,
For honor and for riches
But on my corns too long you’ve tred,
You fine-haired sons of bitches.
Another:
Here I lay me down to sleep
To wait the coming morrow,
Perhaps success, perhaps defeat
And everlasting sorrow;
Yet come what will, I’ll try it once,
My condition can’t be worse,
And if there’s money in that box,
’Tis munney in my purse.
Bole was captured in 1882 after he left a handkerchief at a scene of a crime, Wells Fargo agent James Bunyan Hume tracking its tell-tale laundry mark, “F.O.X. 7”, back to Bole through 91 laundries. However, he served only a moderate term in penitentiary because he had used an empty shotgun on his hold-ups. Released in 1888, Bole disappeared from view for ever.
By the time of Bole’s release Western-style outlawry was on the decline. The badmen were hung, shot, in prison, or had been deterred by the increasing effectiveness of law enforcement. There would be a later flowering of female outlawry, and the Wild Bunch were still to have their prime, as were Bill Doolin’s “Oklahombres”. The Doolin gang were dangerous men, for they were the offspring of a criminal dynasty on the middle-Border which had 30 years of gunfights and larceny behind it: the dynasty of Jesse Woodson James, the most celebrated bank and train robber in American history.
Postscript
Much the most potent Mexican–American resister to Anglo racism was Juan Cortina in Texas. A well-to-do rancher, Cortina witnessed an Anglo marshal pistol-whipping a Mexican in Brownsville on 13 July 1859. When the marshal refused to stop the abuse, Cortina shot the lawman in the shoulder, scooped up the Mexican on his horse and lit out for safety. Two months later Cortina returned to Brownsville with an armed force. He released Mexican prisoners from gaol and summarily executed four Whites who had killed Mexicans but escaped punishment. Cortina then announced the founding of the “Republic of the Rio Grande” and issued a “Proclamation to Texans” which began:
“There is no need of fear. Orderly people and honest citizens are inviolable to us in their persons and interests. Our object, as you have seen, has been to chastise the villainy of our enemies, which heretofore has gone unpunished. These have connived with each other, and form, so to speak, a perfidious inquisitorial lodge to persecute and rob us, without any cause, and for no other crime on our part than that of being of Mexican origin . . .”
For six months “Cortina’s War” spilled along the south Rio Grande Valley ending only when the minority Anglos called in the US Army. Juan Nepomuceno Cortina himself escaped across the border to Mexico, where he continued his new military career and became a general in the Mexican Army.
Jesse James and His Men
The man who held up a train, a gold-laden stagecoach, or a bank, was seen as a Robin Hood, even though he forgot to share the loot.
Robert Elman, Badmen of the West
We are rough men, and used to rough ways.
Bob Younger
On the winter’s afternoon of Tuesday 13 February 1866, twelve horsemen rode into the small town of Liberty, Missouri, and robbed the Clay County Saving Association Bank of $70,000 in bonds, currency and gold. Few, save for the stunned cashiers, saw the deed, for most of the townspeople were in the warm of the courthouse enjoying a local case. One who did witness it was a local youth, George “Jolly” Wymore, who watched the thieves uncertainly from the other side of the street. As the robbers rode out of town, one of them stopped and shot Wymore four times.
The citizens of Liberty were less shocked by the brutal shooting – murder in the Border County was a commonplace – than they were by the armed raid on the bank. Only once before had such a thing happened in the whole of the United States; in 1864 Confederate officer Lieutenant Bennett H. Young had raided three banks in St Albans, Vermont. Young’s robbery had been patriotic: the raid on Liberty had no such noble excuse. It was for private gain.
It was also the beginning of the criminal careers of two men who would become pre-eminent in the folklore of Western outlawry: Jesse Woodson James and his elder brother, Alexander Franklin (“Frank”) James.
The Rise of the James–Younger Gang
Sons of a farmer and Baptist minister, the James brothers were born (Jesse in 1847, Frank in 1843) into a Missouri torn by violence and sectional strife between pro- and anti-slavery forces. When the Civil War came, the family aligned with the Confederate cause, not least because they were slave holders. In 1863 Frank joined the Confederate Raiders of William Clarke Quantrill, a notorious plunderer and murderer. A year later, the slim, boyish Jesse – “Dingus” to his friends – joined a guerrilla band led by one of Quantrill’s lieutenants, “Bloody Bill” Anderson, whose habits included the tying of victims’ scalps to his horse’s bridle. At Anderson’s side James received an introduction into wholesale atrocity. At Centralia, Missouri, he participated in the massacre of 24 unarmed Union soldiers. With the end of the war in sight, Jesse attempted to surrender at Lexington under a white flag. However, since he was a guerrilla, Union forces shot him on sight. Seriously wounded in the right lung, he came close to death. Those nursing him included his first cousin, Zerelda Mimms, later to be his wife.
In the years following the surrender of the South at Appomattox in April 1865, Missouri was awash with embitterment and listless veterans steeped in killing. Many settled down, but some did not. Among the latter were ex-guerrilla leader Arch Clements, whose war crimes had been so extensive that he was one of the few Confederates not to receive a parole. Almost certainly it was Clem
ents, not the James brothers, who put together the gang who robbed the bank at Liberty. Those recruited by Clements included, in addition to Jesse and Frank James, a former Missouri bushwhacker, Thomas Coleman “Cole” Younger. Thus did Jesse James and Cole Younger meet. It was the beginning of a fateful relationship.
Cole Younger was the son of a well-to-do family from Lee’s Summit, Missouri, and had distinguished himself in both depredation and honour during the Civil War. While he had participated in Quantrill’s infamous raid on Lawrence, Kansas, he had also intervened to save the lives of his former teacher, Stephen B. Elkins, and a captured Union officer. In one of the war’s more tranquil moments, he had also met Myra Belle Shirley, later to become infamous bandit queen Belle Starr. The relationship would continue for several years, and Shirley would bear his daughter, Pearl.
