by Paul Martin
In the Kansas cow towns, Libby and Billy lived the sort of uninhibited lifestyle that would be exaggerated and glorified in dime novels and movies ever afterward, a brassy scenario played out to the sounds of tinkling pianos, drunken laughter, and the occasional explosion of six-guns. In truth, life in the frontier fast lane was a tawdry experience. Wild West “fun” was usually little more than the feral, liquor-fueled debauchery of lonely men who knew they were soon to return to lives of monotonous drudgery.15 Like sailors on shore leave, hell-raising wranglers drank and whored and gambled with heedless urgency. A few days later, they rode out of town, broke and hung over and with a good chance of developing gonorrhea or syphilis as a reminder of their stay. No one was weaving memories to tell the grandkids about.
Toward the end of 1875, Libby and Billy moved to Sweetwater, Texas (a Panhandle town now known as Mobeetie). There they opened their own dance hall and bordello. Libby ran the girlie operation as the colorful Squirrel Tooth Alice while Billy spent his time at cards. The Thompsons befriended one of the town’s faro dealers, Bat Masterson, who would later earn fame as a lawman and writer.16 The Sweetwater property lent some stability to Libby and Billy’s lives, although not for long. In 1876, a posse of Texas Rangers nabbed Billy for killing Sheriff Whitney. Hauled off to jail in Kansas, Billy spent nearly a year behind bars. When he finally stood trial, he was acquitted. By the time Billy was released, Libby had disposed of their Sweetwater holdings. In 1878, the two returned to Dodge City, but their nomadic life together was coming to an end.
The following year, Libby gave birth to her fourth child (her firstborn, Rance, had died as an infant). With a growing family to look after, Libby was becoming tired of all the moving around. From the early 1880s on, she remained in Texas, eventually settling in Palo Pinto, not far from where she’d grown up. A lifelong drifter, Billy found it impossible to stay in one place. He continued to pop in and out of Libby’s life over the next several years. Whenever he did show up, Libby usually found herself pregnant a short time later. Gradually, however, Billy’s appearances became less frequent, leaving Libby to get by on her own—or with whatever help she could find (although she continued to use the Thompson name, it’s fairly certain that Libby had relationships with other men during Billy’s absences, and she likely had children by them as well).17
In 1897, after a long absence from his wife, Texas Billy Thompson passed away. Libby was in her early forties then and had six kids to take care of, with another on the way. To provide for her family, she’d fallen back on prostitution. She may have even coaxed her two oldest daughters into the sad profession. Her sons kept up family traditions as well—all of them became criminals. The next quarter of a century was the most blatantly lawless period of Libby’s life. She and her offspring ran wild, first in the Palo Pinto area, then later in Milford, and finally in the vicinity of Mountain View, Oklahoma. Besides prostitution and rustling, they had their hands in bootlegging, robberies, and, in later years, stealing cars—the modern replacement for horse theft.18
Unlike the prostitutes portrayed in romantic accounts of the Old West, Libby Thompson did not have a heart of gold—more like vinegar. As she got older, her desperate circumstances as a single mother with a large family to support made her as testy as a riled up rattlesnake. Her great-grandson and biographer, Laurence E. Gesell, said she was downright mean when he met her near the end of her life, especially toward other females. Her daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters, he wrote, “came to know the meanness of the Old West every time Granny pinched them, pulled their hair, or hit them with her cane.”19
In 1925, Libby Thompson left Oklahoma and moved to California. Settling in Burbank, the seventy-year-old former dance hall girl, drover’s wife, prostitute, madam, and gang leader lived out her twilight years surrounded by her extended family (at least those who weren’t dead or serving time). Squirrel Tooth Alice had finally come to rest in the brilliant sunshine of the Golden State. Not surprisingly, the tough old bird hung on for another twenty-eight years. She wasn’t the kind to give up. By the time she passed away in April 1953, she had long outlived her era, a time when the West was still raw and the faint-of-heart fared best by staying safely at home.
Libby Thompson definitely added a splash of color to the lore of western America. And while she was no angel, who knows, perhaps she strengthened our gene pool just a bit, like a wild mustang breeding with a docile captive herd (in all, she had twelve children, thirty-seven grandchildren, and eighty-eight great-grandchildren).20 As shockingly crude as her life might seem to us today, it was typical of a much larger percentage of the frontier population than we might care to admit. In the Old West, the greatest challenge was simple survival. And that was a game at which the profane, immoral, irascible Mrs. Thompson excelled.
Burt Alvord
An errant breeze blowing down from the Huachuca Mountains brought a touch of coolness to the dusty streets of Tombstone on this late October afternoon in 1881. The sun glinted like a newly minted Mexican peso in the clear Sonoran Desert air. It was a good day to be alive—or to die, which is what Ike and Billy Clanton had in mind for the Earp brothers, those three meddlesome do-gooders with their annoying ideas about law and order. The Clantons and their confederates the McLaurys did a little ranching and a little rustling, and when they felt like having a good time they didn’t want anyone standing in their way. Tombstone had become one of the wildest boomtowns in the West after silver was discovered here in the southeastern corner of the Arizona Territory in 1877.1 Then the Earp boys showed up and things began to quiet down. Earlier this day, Marshall Virgil Earp had arrested Ike Clanton for disorderly conduct after a long night of whiskey and cards. Disarmed and fined $25 before he was released, Clanton vowed revenge.
At the O. K. Corral, the Clantons met with Tom and Frank McLaury to plan what they were going to do about the hated lawmen. A few minutes later, they were confronted in a nearby vacant lot by Virgil, Morgan, and Wyatt Earp and their friend Doc Holliday. At around 3 p.m., after the Clantons and McLaurys refused Marshall Earp’s order to give up their weapons, the most famous gunfight in the history of the American West erupted, a thirty-second melee in which some thirty shots were fired at close range.2 Virgil and Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday were wounded in the shooting; Billy Clanton and Tom and Frank McLaury were killed. Not many townsfolk witnessed the shootout, although everyone had a chance to observe the outcome. Frontier justice was a public affair, with dead bodies displayed as a warning to would-be lawbreakers. Anyone who dropped by Ritter’s undertaking parlor could gawk at the three dead men in their coffins—a bit shot up, but looking downright peaceful in their best laying-out clothes.
The ruckus in Tombstone that October day wasn’t so unusual. In the 1880s, the Arizona Territory swarmed with men like the Clantons and McLaurys. The territory’s silver and gold mines and the herds of cattle here and across the border in Mexico were all just waiting to be plundered. It was as if Hedley Lamarr, the glib conniver in Blazing Saddles, had assembled his personal army of deviants here. “Round up every vicious criminal and gunslinger in the West,” Lamarr told his doofus factotum, played by the inimitable Slim Pickens. “I want rustlers, cutthroats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperadoes, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, half-wits . . . vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers . . . bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves . . . train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers. . . .”3 Just sprinkle in your odd burglar, smuggler, arsonist, rapist, bigamist, claim jumper, cardsharp, hooker, and old-fashioned highwayman, and you had the Arizona criminal community down to a T.
Of course, there were plenty of law-abiding citizens as well. One of the most upstanding was Charles E. Alvord, a Tombstone justice of the peace and mining company employee who’d been a public servant in California for twenty years before moving to this rawboned desert town in 1880. Justice Alvord and his wife, Lucinda, had six children. One of them, their youngest son, fourteen-year-old Albert, or Burt, wou
ld one day follow in his father’s footsteps. It’s uncertain whether Burt witnessed the gunfight at the O. K. Corral, but a little over two years later, he saw another vivid example of the law in action when five members of the murderous Bisbee gang were publicly hanged in Tombstone amid a festive celebration. It was a harsh object lesson, and together with his father’s long career in law enforcement, it should have kept Burt Alvord on the straight and narrow all his life. For some reason, though—despite the fact that he put in nearly fifteen years as a lawman himself—Alvord turned to crime. All but forgotten today, Alvord was notorious in his era, pursued by lawmen all over the West.4 He remains a fascinating character study, since his life represents a classic example of a good man gone bad.
Growing up, Burt Alvord received a spotty education in California and Arizona schoolrooms, but he picked up plenty of other useful skills. He was an excellent tracker, and he knew horses well, working occasionally as a stable hand at the O. K. Corral. He learned much about the ways of the world from his father, whose experiences around the mines and in the courtroom made for lively conversation at the family home on Toughnut Street. And all Burt had to do was keep his eyes open to see the wild goings-on in Tombstone for himself. By his late teens, he was enjoying the uninhibited atmosphere of the town’s many poolrooms and bars, where he developed a taste for boozing and brawling.5 He’d matured into a tall, burly teenager who had an easy laugh—and who could just as easily knock your teeth out. He might not have had much formal education, but he had an advanced degree in how to survive on the Arizona frontier. Tombstone turned out one tough, cunning kid in Burt Alvord.
In 1886, Alvord began his career as a peace officer. At the age of nineteen he became a deputy to Cochise County’s newly elected sheriff, John Slaughter, a pint-size rancher and former Texas Ranger with a stern view of the law. Criminals that Slaughter crossed paths with had a habit of simply disappearing. Though Slaughter knew of Alvord’s fondness for a good time, he hired him anyway. Slaughter needed someone who wasn’t afraid of a scrap. Also, Alvord was familiar with the local territory, having visited every corner of Cochise County on his father’s rounds as a traveling justice of the peace. And Alvord was fluent in Spanish, which was useful when outlaws had to be pursued into Mexico. Alvord proved his worth with his fists and guns on many occasions—whether tracking rustlers, transporting prisoners, or taking part in shootouts with hombres the likes of multiple-murderer Augustine “The Hairy One” Chacon.6
After Sheriff Slaughter’s four years in office, Alvord continued working intermittently as a lawman while trying his hand as a stagecoach driver, teamster, homesteader, and firewood dealer. In 1896, he served on a posse that rode after “Three-Fingered Jack” Dunlap following an attempted bank robbery in Nogales, Arizona. The posse never caught up with Dunlap, which Alvord may have filed away for future reference. (He would later recruit Three-Fingered Jack for his own gang.) By this date, Tombstone’s silver mines had about played out. The latest frenzy was up north in Pearce, where recently discovered gold and silver deposits had set off another boom. Alvord had just gotten married, and he and his new wife, Lola, moved to Pearce. In March 1897, Alvord was appointed as the town’s deputy constable.
Alvord’s stay in Pearce didn’t last long. In July 1897, he took over the job of constable in nearby Willcox, a town with a troublesome cowboy element. Alvord cleaned things up in short order. A few months after pinning on his badge, he shot and killed a young cowboy named Billy King over a bit of drunken horseplay. The following year, Alvord killed an inebriated Mexican who was making a nuisance of himself in the town’s Headquarters Saloon.7 It was clear that Constable Burt Alvord was no one to trifle with. The people of Willcox were pleased. Even the new sheriff of Cochise County, Scott White, took notice. In January 1899, White appointed Alvord as his deputy, meaning the tough lawman held two offices, extending his jurisdiction from Willcox to much of northern Cochise County.
Alvord was never one to let his police work interfere with his carousing. He still drank heavily, and he hung out with the same types of lowlifes he often had to arrest.8 Alvord had always operated on the edge of the law. Once, while helping Sheriff John Slaughter track down and kill a gang of horse thieves, he relieved one of the dead bandits of his money belt, which contained $500 in gold coins, a stash Alvord kept for himself.9 Then there were the rumors about his occasional appropriation of someone else’s cattle. He was certainly wise to all the tricks of the criminal trade after years of chasing rustlers, bank robbers, and train robbers. He knew the roads, train routes, and mountain hideouts where a man could elude a posse. If he decided to become an outlaw, he’d be a formidable one. Just what pushed him over the line is hard to pin down, but it may have been nothing more complicated than the lust for easy money. With all the mining activity in southern Arizona, trains were loaded with treasure. In September 1899, Alvord gave in to the temptation. He and three friends robbed a train—the start of a brief but active criminal career that irrevocably ended the Alvord family’s forty-year heritage of upholding the law.10
Alvord’s gang included drinking buddies Billy Stiles, Matt Burts, and Bill Downing. Ironically, all three men had served as deputy constables under Alvord, meaning everyone involved in the robbery was making the leap from good guy to bad. Maybe they’d all been reading too many romanticized accounts of the James gang and other “Robin Hood” bandits who were glorified for sticking it to eastern-owned railroads and banks. And Alvord may have felt that he no longer had anyone to answer to, since his father had died the year before (his mother passed away in 1886). Whatever spurred them on, the gang waylaid a Southern Pacific train as it labored up a steep grade at the isolated town of Cochise ten miles outside of Willcox, making off with an estimated $2,500 in cash and jewelry.11
Besides doing the planning, Alvord arranged an alibi for the gang by wrapping himself around a glass of whiskey in a Willcox saloon while the robbery was taking place. When news of the holdup reached Constable Alvord, he was shocked—shocked. He immediately led a posse on a boisterous search for the perpetrators. Riding along in the posse were none other than messieurs Stiles and Downing, who’d returned to town and stashed the swag in a chicken coop at Alvord’s place. When the sheriff of Cochise County showed up to look for the robbers, Alvord sent him on a wild goose chase in the Chiricahua Mountains. Despite everyone’s best efforts, the robbers somehow got away. (The boys probably had a good laugh over a beer as they thought of Sheriff White blundering around in the hills.)
The success of the gang’s first train robbery prompted Alvord and Stiles to plan another outing in February 1900. Burts and Downing had taken their cuts from the first job and bowed out, so some new gang members were recruited—five scruffy characters that included Three-Fingered Jack Dunlap and “Bravo Juan” Yoas. The gang’s next target was the railway depot in the town of Fairbank. This time, both Alvord and Stiles would be elsewhere, establishing alibis. Led by Dunlap, the remaining gang members immediately ran into trouble. When they made their move, a guard opened fire with a shotgun, wounding Three-Fingered Jack and Bravo Juan. The thieves limped away with only $42.12 They split up but were all eventually caught. Before he died from his wounds, Dunlap named Alvord and Stiles as the masterminds of the heist. To save himself, Stiles then fingered Alvord as the brains behind the Cochise robbery.
Alvord and the others were locked up in the Tombstone jail, with Stiles walking free as a government witness. Even though he’d evaded charges, Stiles decided to demonstrate his loyalty/bravery/stupidity by appearing at the jail with a gun, shooting a deputy sheriff in the leg, and springing Alvord and Bravo Juan. The three stole some horses and made for the Dragoon Mountains. Before long, the mercurial Stiles had grown tired of life on the run. He returned home and contacted the Cochise County sheriff’s office, cutting another deal by providing information on the whereabouts of his partners, who’d headed for Mexico. Alvord hid out in Sonora for the next couple of years, living on money from the Cochise robber
y.13 (His wife gave up on him after his jailbreak; she got a divorce in 1901 and went back home to Nogales.)
In the summer of 1902, Arizona authorities offered Alvord a deal if he would assist in the capture of the elusive murderer Augustine Chacon. Alvord accepted, and after the Mexican killer was apprehended (with the help of the irrepressible Billy Stiles serving as an undercover Arizona Ranger), he gave himself up, expecting to be cleared of all charges. Alvord was free on bail for several months, but in July 1903, he found himself back in the Tombstone hoosgow, his “deal” forgotten. Billy Stiles ended up there, too, despite all his bobbing and weaving. Alvord saw the inevitability of his conviction and pleaded guilty to a single charge of stealing US mail. He received an extremely lenient two-year sentence. All other charges were dropped, including both train robberies. It was about as good an outcome as Alvord could have hoped for. But then the old magic kicked in between him and his on-again, off-again crony: he and Stiles hatched another jailbreak.
In December 1903, Alvord and Stiles acquired some tools and used them to saw through the bars of their cells and punch a hole in the jailhouse wall. Like a covey of quail, a dozen or so prisoners burst through the hole and scattered in every direction. Alvord and Stiles headed for Mexico. They eluded the Arizona Rangers and Mexican Rurales for several weeks, zigzagging all over Sonora and apparently supporting themselves with a string of robberies.14 Some accounts say they faked their own deaths by shipping a pair of coffins to Tombstone with a message that they’d been killed, although the ruse failed when authorities looked inside the coffins and found two dead Mexicans.15
