The Mammoth Book of the West (30 page)

There were no dissenters to the programme. I saw at a glance that my bunkie was heart and soul in the play, and took my cue and kept my mouth shut. We circled round the town to a vacant lot within a block of the rear of the dance hall. Honeyman was left to hold the horses; then, taking off our belts and hanging them on the pommels of our saddles, we secreted our six-shooters inside the waist-bands of our trousers. The hall was still crowded with the revelers when we entered, a few at a time, Forrest and Priest being the last to arrive. Forrest had changed hats with The Rebel, who always wore a black one, and as the bouncer circulated around, Quince stepped squarely in front of him. There was no waste of words, but a gun-barrel flashed in the lamplight, and the bouncer, struck
with the six-shooter, fell like a beef. Before the bewildered spectators could raise a hand, five six-shooters were turned into the ceiling. The lights went out at the first fire, and amidst the rush of men and the screaming of women, we reached the outside, and within a minute were in our saddles. All would have gone well had we returned by the same route and avoided the town; but after crossing the railroad track, anger and pride having not been properly satisfied, we must ride through the town.

On entering the main street, leading north and opposite the bridge on the river, somebody of our party in the rear turned his gun loose into the air. The Rebel and I were riding in the lead, and at the clattering of hoofs and shooting behind us, our horses started on the run, the shooting by this time having become general. At the second street crossing, I noticed a rope of fire belching from a Winchester in the doorway of a store building. There was no doubt in my mind but we were the object of the manipulator of that carbine, and as we reached the next cross street, a man kneeling in the shadow of a building opened fire on us with a six-shooter. Priest reined in his horse, and not having wasted cartridges in the open-air shooting, returned the compliment until he emptied his gun. By this time every officer in the town was throwing lead after us, some of which cried a little too close for comfort. When there was no longer any shooting on our flanks, we turned into a cross street and soon left the lead behind us.

It is noteworthy how close Forrest was to his man when he opened fire. Only in cinema and novels – such as Owen Wister’s incomparably influential masterpiece,
The Virginian
(1902) – did the Code of the West require a formal “walkdown” on a dusty street. In reality gunfights happened at near point-blank range, anywhere, and without any formal challenge to draw. A rare, true example of a
walkdown – which Wister may have known about when writing
The Virginian
– occurred on 21 July 1865, when “Prince of Pistoleers” Wild Bill Hickok met Dave Tutt on the Market Square of Springfield, Missouri.

James Butler Hickok, born in Illinois in 1837, had participated in his first gunfight in 1861, notoriously shooting unarmed Nebraska rancher Dave McCanles, who had taunted him for being a “hermaphrodite”. During the Civil War Hickok served in the Union army as a wagonmaster, spy, and General Philip H. Sheridan’s scout. His striking looks caught the attention of many, including George Custer’s wife, Libby: “Physically, he was a delight to look on. Tall, lithe, and free in every motion, he rode and walked as if every muscle was perfection, and the careless swing of his body as he moved seemed perfectly in keeping with the man, the country, the time in which he lived.”

Like Hickok, Tutt had fought in the Civil War, although on the Confederate side. The two had argued over cards, and Tutt had taken Hickok’s watch in lieu of a debt, antagonizing Hickok by declaring he would wear the watch publicly in the town square. This was an unacceptable slight to Hickok’s pride, and confrontation followed.

In front of an eager crowd, the two men approached each other from opposite sides of the square. When they were 50 yards apart, Tutt drew, fired – and missed. Hickok, drawing at almost the same time, shot Tutt through the heart, swiftly turning around to where Tutt’s friends stood, in case they had any idea of instant revenge. “Aren’t you satisfied, gentlemen?”, he is reputed to have said. “Put up your shootin’-irons, or there’ll be more dead men here.” The men obeyed and dispersed.

After this moment of glory, Hickok became marshal of Hays City, Kansas, and Abilene in its last season as a cattle town, then wandered the West as a gambler and drinker, and spent some time with Buffalo Bill’s play “The Scouts
of the Plains”. He was sacked for shooting too close to the other actors, causing them to have powder burns. Although Hickok once declared “I would be willing to take my oath on the Bible tomorrow that I have killed over a hundred [men],” his substantiated slayings total seven, possibly less. The accidental killing of his Abilene deputy, Mike Williams, together with failing eyesight due to gonorrhoea, inclined Hickok against gunplay in his latter years. He was shot in the back by drifter (and possible hired assassin) Jack McCall in a Deadwood saloon on 2 August 1876.

In his gunfighting days, Hickok’s weapon of choice was the Navy Colt revolver, two of which he stuck in his belt, butts forward. Firearms were unquestionably the pre-eminent means of inflicting violent death on the frontier, for the Code decreed that fists and knives were unmanly. (Conversely criminals, being men and women unworthy of honour, were invariably executed by the dishonourable method of hanging.) The gun was also more lethally efficient than other weapons. To bloody extent, the development of frontier violence can be traced in the history of American weapons technology.

The first truly American firearm was the Kentucky rifle of the eighteenth-century pioneers, its long barrel and relatively small bore designed to meet specific wilderness needs. An acute shortage of artisans forced America to mechanize and by the end of the same century Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, began to demonstrate the virtues of mass production when his company started to manufacture muskets from standardized, interchangeable parts.

In the 1840s the Whitney Armory at Whitneyville,
Connecticut, produced under licence Samuel Colt’s perfected revolving handgun, which had been successfully tested by Captain Samuel Walker and the Texas Rangers against the Comanche in 1834. About 1,100 of the Colt “Walker” were manufactured, and Colt used the profits to set up a factory of his own at Hartford, Connecticut. Men going West for the Gold Rush and settlement gave Colt a ready market, and his revolver became the staple handgun of the West, eclipsing the manufactures of Remington, Smith & Wesson, Savage, and Merwin & Hulbert amongst others. “God created man, but it was Sam Colt’s revolver that made him equal” was the proverb of the frontier. There were numerous models, and Wild Bill Hickok was far from alone in finding the 1851 Navy in .36 calibre to his taste. Other prominent Colts were the Model 1860 Army and, most famous of all, the 1873 Peacemaker (also known as the Single Action Army and the Frontier). The Peacemaker was the first Colt to make use of an 1860 invention of rival firm Smith & Wesson, the “fixed” or metallic cartridge, which contained cap, ball and powder in a brass or copper case. Before this, Colts were fired by percussion caps, with paper cartridges or the powder and ball loose. The tendency of the old-style guns to jam, and their slowness in loading, created the custom – as with Hickok – of carrying two guns. The second was a reserve. Generally, guns were worn hip-high, either on a belt, or tucked in pants tops.

Those for whom gunfighting was a career, either inside or outside the law, tended to view accuracy and calmness as greater virtues than speed in the wielding of guns. William B. (“Bat”) Masterson, the dapper lawman of Dodge and Trinidad, Colorado, summed up the successful gunfighter thus:

Any man who does not possess courage, proficiency in the use of firearms, and deliberation had better make up his mind at the beginning to settle his differences in some other manner than by appeal to the pistol. I have known men in the West whose courage could not be questioned and whose expertness with the pistol was simply marvellous, who fell easy victims before men who added deliberation to the other two qualities.

Masterson’s judgement was based more on observation than on personal experience. Although he cultivated a reputation as a gunfighter, Masterson took part in but three gunfights during a long career on the frontier, and there is no evidence that he killed anyone in the line of duty, although he is alleged to have shot Sergeant King, a member of the Fourth Cavalry based in Mobeetie, Texas, in an argument over a woman, Molly Brennan.

The advice of a gunfighter who had killed his man, Wild Bill Hickok, was notably prosaic: “If you have to shoot a man, shoot him in the guts near the navel. You may not get a fatal shot, but he will get a shock that will paralyse his brain and arm so much that the fight is over.”

As the name Colt became synonymous with handgun, so did Winchester with shoulder arm. The 1873 Winchester 15-shot repeating rifle is famed as “the gun that won the West.” At least one eminent Westerner was moved to write to the firm in praise of the new rifle’s many glories:

I have been using and have thoroughly tested your latest improved rifle. Allow me to say that I have tried and used nearly every kind of gun made in the United States, and for general hunting, or Indian fighting, I pronounce your improved Winchester the boss.

An Indian will give more for one of your guns than any other gun he can get.

While in the Black Hills this last summer I crippled a bear, and Mr Bear made for me, and I am certain had I not been armed with one of your repeating rifles I would now be in the happy hunting grounds. The bear was not thirty feet from me when he charged, but before he could reach me I had eleven bullets in him, which was a little more lead than he could comfortably digest.

Believe me, that you have the most complete rifle now made.

The Winchester ’73 became so popular that in 1878 Colt rechambered the Peacemaker revolver to hold its .44-calibre shell. This meant that a man only had to carry one kind of ammunition for both guns. Cowboys also found that the Winchester’s iron-shod butt was indispensable for crushing beans when they wanted to boil up a cup of coffee.

All these weapons and others played a part in making the West a dark and bloody ground. Between 1866 and 1900 around 20,000 people died on the frontier of what was euphemistically called “lead poisoning”.

Yet, ultimately, the story of White Western settlement is not one of lawlessness and violence, but of the triumph of law and order: the “taming” of the West. Even the Code, while stimulating violence, paradoxically contained tenets which installed a semblance of social order: shooting women and unarmed men was contemptible (therefore many men went unarmed); a man’s word was his bond,
and a bargain sealed with a handshake was as good as a lawyer’s agreement. One observer of the cattle trade remarked: “I’ve seen many a transaction in steers, involving more than $100,000, closed and carried out to the letter with no semblance of a written contract.” Other rules decreed that horse-stealing was an unforgivable evil (for without a horse a man could not negotiate the dangerous expanses of the West), and that strangers were to be treated with hospitality.

Sometimes settlers coming into a wilderness region devised their own systems of law and order, like the Mayflower Compact and the Watauga Association of trans-Appalachian Presbyterians, but in general they imitated the forms of government of the place they had come from. In essence, therefore, westering settlers traced back their legal system to two ancient British institutions: the sheriff, who had powers to deputize citizens, form a posse and collect taxes; and the justice court, headed by a justice of the peace.

Most justices on the American frontier had no legal training and little knowledge of the law. They included such colourful figures as Judge Roy Bean, saloon-keeper and the self-styled “law west of the Pecos” for over 20 years. Bean’s mildest eccentricity was an obsession with the English actress Lillie Langtry, after whom he named the village (Langtry) from where he dispensed his verdicts. These were sometimes bizarre. They famously included fining the corpse of a railroad worker $40 for carrying a concealed weapon. He also once dismissed the Irish murderer of a Chinaman because the
Revised Statutes of Texas
, 1879 edition – the only legal work he knew or cared for – said nothing about killing “heathen Chinee”. Bearded, his stomach hanging over his belt, Bean liked to have a cold beer at the end of a court session. Fortunately, the courthouse was also Bean’s saloon. Despite his eccentricity,
Bean’s law was also effective, and was tolerated by the Texas Rangers because it gave peace of a kind.

As a region became more organized, responsibility for law enforcement increasingly came to rest on federal and territorial/state officials. Federal judges tended to be more learned and less prone to local influence than justices of the peace. Most famed of the federal judges was Isaac C. Parker, who became known as the Hanging Judge because of the 168 men he sent to the gallows (of whom 89 were reprieved). Yet Parker was not a sadistic man. A devout Methodist, he was appointed by President Grant in 1875 to clean up the US Western District centred on Fort Smith, which also had jurisdiction over Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). Aside from some 50,000 official Indian inhabitants, the Territory was infested with White outlaws – who used it as a sanctuary – and frontier “riff-raff” who followed the few legal White enterprises allowed there. Parker worked six days a week to round up and try lawbreakers. In a period of 21 years he tried 28,000 suspects. When a man, according to the rule of law, had to be hanged, he wept openly. The Indians, in particular, found in him a friend. When he died in 1896, a Creek chief brought wild flowers to put on his grave.

Also at the business end of federal law enforcement was the United States marshal and deputy marshal. Unlike the sheriff, who was elected (usually for two years) and parochial in his interests, the US marshal was appointed by the president, worked under the jurisdiction of a federal court, and tended to be concerned with the violation of federal laws such as mail robbery.